Abstract

There has been considerable interest recently in the ability of social comparison nudges to trigger changes in environmentally-related behaviors. Whether social comparison nudges can influence the behavior of professional economic agents such as farmers or firms is still unclear. In this paper, we report the effects of a randomly allocated social comparison nudge on the water consumption of farmers in South-West France. We find heterogeneous effects, with the nudge increasing the proportion of farmers consuming water, but also decreasing extreme consumption, although this last effect is estimated with much less precision. To our knowledge, we provide the first evidence of a boomerang effect of a social comparison nudge in the context of professional economic agents.

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