Maria José Montoya Villalobos

Comportements, Droits et Bien-être

2023-8

Noémi Berlin, Maria José Montoya Villalobos

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Abstract: This experiment seeks to study the impact of uncertainty and attitudes towards uncertainty on charity donations. We use a modified dictator game, where the donations received by the beneficiaries (environmental NGOs) are exposed to different levels of uncertainty. We study the level of donations and elicit risk aversion, ambiguity aversion, likelihood insensitivity, and pessimism. We aim to test if different levels of uncertainty at the receiver level (risk and ambiguity) impact donations. We do not find any differences between levels of uncertainty compared to no uncertainty. We find that a ``high" level of ambiguity has a significant and negative effect on altruistic behavior compared to a risk or a``low" ambiguity environment. We also find that the effect of pessimism depends on the level of ambiguity. We find no effect of ambiguity aversion, likelihood insensitivity, and pessimism under ``low" ambiguity on altruistic behavior. Meanwhile, under ``high" ambiguity, we find a negative effect of pessimism on charitable giving. These results suggest that there is a threshold for which ambiguity and ambiguity attitudes have a negative impact on donations.
Mot(s) clé(s): Charitable giving, uncertainty, pro-social behavior, ambiguity attitudes

2021-9

Maria José Montoya Villalobos

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Abstract: This paper proposes a green consumption model under uncertainty, where we consider green goods as impure public goods and analyze the comparative statics of green consumption. We consider that the environmental efficacity of green goods is uncertain, and we model uncertainty with risk perceptions, specifically with trust (defined as a belief about the veracity of the available information) and pessimism/optimism (which represents the consumer's probability estimation of the realization of the worst possible outcome when consuming green goods). We study their respective impact on green consumption and consider individuals with heterogeneous beliefs. Pessimism has a negative impact on green demand; meanwhile, an increase in trust does not always imply an increase in green demand. We determine the impact of uncertainty on the equilibrium and the socially optimal level of private voluntary provision and show that green consumption decreases with pessimism at the equilibrium. Meanwhile, at the optimum, an increase in pessimism will
decrease the individual's contributions for both the pessimist and optimist consumers. Moreover, we also find that the sub-optimality of the Nash equilibrium, in the presence of an impure public good, is not straightforward under uncertainty.
Mot(s) clé(s): Green consumption, trust, pessimism, uncertainty, impure public goods.