Willingness to Pay of Committed Citizens: A Field Experiment

In this paper, we propose a behavioural approach to determine the extent to which the consumer/citizen distinction affects interpretations of monetary values. We perform a field experiment dealing with air pollution, where some (randomly selected) subjects are given the opportunity to behave politically by signing a petition for environmental protection prior to stating their private preferences in a standard contingent valuation exercise. We show that the petition has the potential to influence respondents' willingness to pay and that whether the effect is negative or positive depends on the degree of (dis)similarity between the petition and the scenario in which willingness to pay are elicited. We interpret the results using the theory of commitment borrowed from social psychology.