• DOI:10.1257/AER.101.3.65
• Corpus ID: 53468137

Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, and Economic Incentives

@article{Viscusi2010PromotingRP,
  title={Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, and Economic Incentives},
  author={W. Kip Viscusi and Joel Huber and Jason Bell},
  journal={Environmental Law \& Policy eJournal},
  year={2010}
}

• W. Viscusi, Joel Huber, Jason Bell
• Published 8 December 2010
• Economics
• Environmental Law & Policy eJournal

Individual behaviors that benefit the environment are potentially influenced by personal values of environmental quality, social norms that encourage proenvironmental actions, and economic incentives. Economic incentives often loom particularly large, including those that result from environmental policies. Less well understood are the respective roles of private values and social norms. Do people undertake proenvironmental actions more out of their per sonal valuations of the environment that might be characterized as warm glow effects or from the social norms that reinforce proenvironmental behaviors? The least explored component of these deter minants of proenvironmental behavior is that of social norms. We characterize social norms in terms of what is normatively appropriate rather than what is the conventional mode of behavior. There is a burgeoning economics literature modeling social norms, but not a commensurate empirical investigation of their practical impor tance. If norms do matter, what is the respective role of personal norms that a person imposes on others compared with the external norms that people perceive are imposed on them by others? To what extent are these social norms the result of legal regimes and regulatory policies that establish standards for behavior? Our empirical analysis estimates the role of these influences. The empirical case study for this article is based on an analysis of recycling of plastic water bottles. Recycling policies are becoming