Informational nudges or incentives? A field experiment on vegetarian choices.
在一场公共节日的食品市场区域，通过实地实验比较了信息助推、价格干预及其组合对消费者选择素食还是肉食的影响，发现价格干预显著减少了肉食选择，而信息助推无显著效果。
Food production and consumption are primary contributors to climate change. There is growing interest in behavioral interventions aimed at reducing emissions by promoting vegetarian choices. This pre-registered field experiment assesses the (relative) effectiveness of an informational nudge, a price intervention, and their combination on consumers' choices between meat-based and vegetarian food options. We analyze actual food choices at a public festival with a food market area, where participants receive an informational nudge designed to increase the choice of vegetarian food and different financial incentives in the form of food vouchers for vegetarian options. The analysis reveals no significant effect of the informational nudge, while the price intervention significantly reduces the likelihood of choosing meat-based options over vegetarian ones. Additionally, exploratory analyses focus on two temporal aspects related to the delivery of our interventions: a measure of exposure duration for participants who engaged with the informational nudge and the time elapsed between exposure to the informational nudge and the actual food choice.