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Religious Identity and Climate-Sustainable Behavior
by Zixin “Finnie” Zhao
Abstract
What motivates individual action on climate change? The study focuses on the potential influence of religious identities. It employs a laboratory experiment to investigate how priming religious identity affects individuals’ donation behaviors to climate versus non-climate charities in a dictator game setting. In contrast with expectations, this study finds no significant evidence that an increase in religious identity salience influences religious individuals’ donation to climate, nor does it affect overall charitable donation behaviors, when demographic factors and perceptions about charity are controlled. Although failing to establish a causal relationship between religious identity and climate sustainable behavior or a linkage between religious identity and pro-social behavior, this research marks an innovative attempt to use experimental economics methodology to study factors that shape individual responses to the global climate challenge.
Professor Rachel Kranton, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C91; D64; Q54; Z12
The Market for Apples: A Theory of Identity and Consumption
By Clement Lee
This paper presents an economic model of the effects of identity and social norms on consumption patterns. By incorporating qualitative studies in psychology and sociology, I propose a utility function that features two components – economic (functional) and identity elements. This setup is extended to analyze a market comprising a continuum of consumers, whose identity distribution along a spectrum of binary identities is described by a Beta distribution. I also introduce the notion of salience in the context of identity and consumption decisions. The key result of the model suggests that fundamental economic parameters, such as price elasticity and market demand, can be altered by identity elements. In addition, it predicts that firms in perfectly competitive markets may associate their products with certain types of identities, in order to reduce product substitutability and attain price–setting power.
Advisor: Michelle Connolly, Rachel Kranton | JEL Codes: D11, D21 | Tagged: Consumption, Firm Theory, Heterogeneous Agents, Identity, Social Norm
