One Size Does Not Fit All: Financial Incentives Needed to Change Physical Exercise Levels for Different Groups.

This study estimated the distribution of willingness to accept (WTA) for a physical activity behavior change intervention entailing the completion of 10,000 steps/day to shed light on which levels of incentives trigger a change in behavior for different proportions of the population and for more at-risk subgroups. An online contingent valuation (CV) survey was administered to 1130 respondents in the Basque Autonomous Community, Spain. The survey queried respondents about their physical activity levels and intention to engage in physical activity before presenting the WTA questions. Nonparametric WTA values were estimated for the whole sample and for subsamples of active, inactive, and overweight and obese people. One-quarter of respondents would engage with the hypothetical program even without payment, but if a monetary incentive was offered them, they would take it. The median WTA for committing to complete 10,000 steps/day is €0.23 for the full sample, €0.21 for active, €0.25 for inactive, and €0.23 for overweight and obese people. The WTA at 75th percentile is €4 for the full sample, €1.70 for active, €10.80 for inactive, and €5 for overweight and obese respondents. WTA is positively affected by a person's lack of disposable time to increase their physical activity and, for inactive people, by their poor intention to become physically active.

The cognitive and experiential effects of flood risk framings and experience, and their influence on adaptation investment behaviour.

This study explores how decision makers invest in adaptation to protect against flood risks in response to a) different framings of flood risk information, and b) after experiencing losses from a hypothetical flood event. An incentivised economic lab experiment is conducted on a sample of students in Bilbao (Basque Country, Spain). A 2 × 2 between-subject design is used to measure investment behaviour with and without exposure to a flood risk map and after exposure to impacts framed as economic losses versus number of persons affected. Experience is measured through a 2-period repeated game within-subject design. Flood risk maps and impacts framed as number of persons affected were conducive to more experiential forms of decision-making, while decisions based on impacts framed as economic losses were more cognitive in nature. Those that saw text-only framings used a combination of cognitive and experiential factors for making decisions. While exposure to maps evoked more affect-driven responses, they were associated with lower ratings of positive affect and self-efficacy, and resulted in lower investments in protection compared to text-only framings. Greater experiential processing was found for impact framings based on persons affected, but they were not especially effective at increasing personal relevance of the issue or in driving investments. Individuals who experienced losses from a hypothetical flood event had greater ratings of negative affect, and made subsequent decisions that were more affect-driven in nature. In contrast, individuals who did not experience losses had greater ratings of positive affect, and made subsequent decisions based on primarily cognitive factors. Investments in protection reduced for those who did not experience losses, and remained the same for those who did experience losses. Results suggest that changes in adaptation investments between decision points may be dependent on both the experience (or lack thereof) of losses, as well as the extent to which individuals were risk-averse or risk-taking in previous investment decisions.

Factors affecting energy-efficiency investment in the hotel industry: survey results from Spain.

Increasing energy efficiency is a major way of saving energy and thus reducing energy expenses. However, adoption of energy efficiency is generally low, as demonstrated by the energy efficiency gap. To understand that gap, this paper analyses the factors that affect how the energy efficiency attribute is rated in investment in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in the hotel industry in Spain. A survey conducted on two hundred owners of hotels, hostels and holiday cottages (referred to jointly here for the sake of convenience as "the hotel industry") shows that the value placed on energy efficiency is influenced not just by climate conditions, environmental concern and type of hotel but also by other attributes of the HVAC system such as brand reliability, price and performance. The hotel industry may also be identifying EE as a proxy for quality rather than savings. Designing the right energy-efficiency policy entails accounting for potential responses by agents, and this analysis helps identify those drivers to which they may or may not respond.

Costs and benefits of soil protection and sustainable land management practices in selected European countries: Towards multidisciplinary insights.

Soil protection and sustainable land management practices for croplands are usually considered to be cost-effective. However, to date little economic information has emerged about these techniques and there is no comprehensive economic appraisal to effectively help guide investment decisions. This review proposes a new multidisciplinary approach for an economic assessment of soil protection practices at the farm level at selected European sites. It draws together and integrates economic data on a selection of measures based on information related to climate change, soil degradation and biodiversity research that are rarely investigated jointly. Out of the studies reviewed, quantitative and qualitative data from 26 scientific papers and technical reports were gathered into a database. For the quantitative data analysis, 14 of those studies were used. The main results show that most practices may not pass the cost/benefit test and that their benefits are not, as is often assumed, systematically higher than their costs. Specific quantitative results are not definitive but we find that estimation methods may have unintended consequences. They may well lead to ineffective investment decisions unless more holistic and multidisciplinary approaches to soil protection are taken.