MPRA Munich Personal RePEc Archive Green goods: are they good or bad news for the environment? Evidence from a laboratory experiment on impure public goods Munro, Alistair and Valente, Marieta National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan, NIMA { Applied Microeconomics Research Unit, University of Minho, Portugal, Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, UK 30. October 2008 Online at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13024/ MPRA Paper No. 13024, posted 27. January 2009 / 03:02 Green goods: are they good or bad news for the environment? Evidence from a laboratory experiment on impure public goods (Version January-2009) Alistair Munro Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, UK National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies Tokyo, Japan and Marieta Valente (corresponding author: email to
[email protected] ) Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, UK NIMA – Applied Microeconomics Research Unit, University of Minho, Portugal The authors thank Dirk Engelmann for helpful comments and suggestions as well as participants at the Research Strategy Seminar at RHUL 2007, IMEBE 2008, Experimental Economics Days 2008 in Dijon, EAERE 2008 meeting, European ESA 2008 meeting. Also, we thank Claire Blackman for her help in recruiting subjects. Marieta Valente acknowledges the financial support of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Abstract An impure public good is a commodity that combines public and private characteristics in fixed proportions. Green goods such as dolphin-friendly tuna or green electricity programs provide increasings popular examples of impure goods. We design an experiment to test how the presence of impure public goods affects pro-social behaviour.