Is fairness blind?--The effect of framing on preferences for effort-sharing rules

Abstract

This paper uses a choice experiment to study citizens' preferences for effort-sharing rules for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. For a given global cost and level of emission reduction, we study the willingness to pay for various rules that imply different distributions of the cost between EU, the US, China and Africa. The focus of this paper is on the use of two different treatments, one where the respondents were informed about the country (or country group) names and one where the names were replaced with anonymous labels A-D. This allows us to test whether people's preferences for effort-sharing rules depend on the framing of the problem. We find that the ranking of the rules and the strength of the preferences are not significantly different between the two treatments, and hence we find no evidence of ingroup bias in preferences for effort-sharing rules.Climate change Fairness Framing Ethics Effort-sharing rules