UNDERSTANDING MARKETS WITH SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE CONSUMERS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kaufmann, Marc; Andre, Peter; Koszegi, Botond
• 署名单位: Goethe University Frankfurt; University of Bonn
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjae009
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 1989-2035
• 关键词: Perfect competition; carbon leakage; TRADE; climate

摘要

Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such socially responsible consumers in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational consequentialist consumers. In violation of price taking, equilibrium feedback nontrivially dampens the impact of a person's consumption on aggregate consumption, undermining the motive to mitigate. This leads to a new type of market failure, where even consumers who fully internalize the externality overconsume externality-generating goods. At the same time, socially responsible consumers change the relative effectiveness of taxes, caps, and other policies in lowering the externality. Second, since consumer beliefs about and preferences over their market impacts play a crucial role in our framework, we investigate them empirically via a tailored survey. Consistent with our model, consumers are often consequentialist, and many believe that they have a dampened impact on aggregate consumption. Inconsistent with our model, however, we also find many respondents who expect to have a one-to-one impact on aggregate consumption. Third, therefore, we analyze how such naive consumers modify our theoretical conclusions. They consume less than rational consumers in a single-good economy, but may consume more in a multigood economy with cross-market spillovers. A mix of naive and rational consumers may yield the worst outcomes.