Erez Yoeli
Ph.D. Student

Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago

[curriculum vitae]   [email me]  

Recent Work

Does Social Approval Stimulate Prosocial Behavior? Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Residential Electricity Market (January 2009)

At least since Veblen (1899), economists have proposed that people do good because they desire "social approval'' and want to look good in front of others. Evidence from the laboratory supports this claim, but is difficult to generalize due to the unrealistic degree of scrutiny in a laboratory environment. I administer a field experiment to test the potency of social approval in a realistic and policy relevant setting. In the experiment, which is ongoing, I solicit customers of a large electric utility for a program that helps prevent blackouts (4024 have been solicited so far). I vary whether their decision to participate in the program is revealed to their neighbors. So far, customers whose decision is revealed are 3.6\% more likely to sign up than those whose decision is anonymous when their decision is framed as a contribution to a public good. I explore whether social approval contributes to crowding out and conditionally cooperative behavior, but the evidence so far is inconclusive.

Previous Work