NANCY Seminar – Nahed EDDAI (BETA, INRAE)

Event details :

Title: Ambiguity Attitudes in Climate Context and Willingness to Pay to Reduce CO2 Emissions

Abstract: Ambiguity attitudes, which refer to differences between decisions under risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities), are well-established in behavioral economics. Their implications have been increasingly recognized in environmental and climate change economics. However, most discussions about ambiguity in this domain have so far been confined to theoretical applications in normative climate policy analysis. Notably, there has been a lack of descriptive investigations into climate-related ambiguity attitudes, despite their potential relevance for understanding voluntary climate action and climate policy acceptance. The current study addresses this gap by analyzing ambiguity attitudes in the climate context and exploring their empirical link with willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation. Our experiment demonstrates that individuals’ preferences under climate-related ambiguity are a significant covariate of their WTP for climate change mitigation. These results shed new light on public attitudes towards climate policies under climate uncertainty.