Behavioral rebound effect and moral compensation: An online experiment

Abstract

This paper investigates the behavioral rebound effect as defined by Dorner (2019) in an analytical framework where individuals have environmental preferences. We also study the impact of moral compensation (moral licensing and moral cleansing) on pro-environmental behavior. We propose a theoretical model that integrates behavioral and emotional factors and we conduct an online experiment with 1622 subjects to test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that a decrease in the marginal damage of a polluting good leads to a decrease in individual’s pro-environmental behavior. This result confirms the existence of the behavioral rebound effect. Additionally, our results show that the moral cleansing effect positively influences pro-environmental behavior, especially among individuals with the strongest environmental attitudes.