Waste Prevention and Social Preferences: The Role of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations

Though waste reduction is at the top of the waste hierarchy, EU policies have historically introduced waste management incentives mainly on the side of recovery, recycling and disposal. Only very recently EU Directives started framing targets and policy for waste reduction. Within this setting, we aim at testing whether individual behavior towards waste reduction and recycling is driven by altruistic preferences or obey to incentive based schemes, namely pigouvian waste tariffs. We exploit a new survey that covers thousands of individuals for the EU27 to test what we may define the ‘Andreoni altruistic preference effect’ (Andreoni, 1989, 1990) when people face with public good collective management. The analysis econometrically investigates whether this effect is significant among the many socio economic drivers, or more ‘individual’ egotist behavior is behind consumer’s choices in this realm. We verify both whether such effects are behind reduction of food waste and if waste reduction is correlated with recycling.