Essays on Consumer Behavior and the Environment

ABSTRACT

Consumer behavior plays a key role in our understanding of environmental sustainability. While significant research has focused on accounting for the environmental impacts of household consumption, less attention has been paid to how consumer demand mediates the net environmental impacts of proposed solutions to ongoing environmental challenges. Such an agenda, which is the focus of this dissertation, must consider both how consumers respond to environmental interventions and how the resulting changes in consumer demand lead to net environmental impacts. The first chapter, The role of prices in determining the environmental impacts of product choice, explores how a consumer's choice between products affects his aggregate carbon footprint. Five case studies are considered, where commonly proposed environmental behaviors increase environmental impacts as a result of price difference across alternatives. The second chapter, Curbside recycling increases household consumption, uses econometric methods to study curbside recycling programs, finding that curbside recycling programs increase household consumption, a process that likely reduces the environmental benefits of recycling. The third chapter, Demand-driven conservation, analyzes how changes in demand can lead to biomass benefits for wild fisheries and performs a case study to investigate how cell-based seafood, a novel food product in development, may lead to ocean conservation.

BIO

Jason graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BS in biochemistry (2015) and from UC Berkeley with an ME in civil and environmental engineering (2016) before starting his PhD at the Bren school in 2016. During his time at Bren, Jason has focused on interdisciplinary research and teaching. He has taught across several departments at UCSB, including a course he developed for the ES program, Consumer Behavior and the Environment. He has made contributions to the literature on circular economy rebound, sustainable diets, causal inference in the context of environmental policy, the environmental impacts of new product introductions, and the future of marine food production. Jason’s dissertation focuses on consumer behavior and the environment, and in particular on the role that consumer demand plays in mediating the environmental outcomes of demand-side interventions. His chapters investigate sustainable consumer choice, the environmental merit of curbside recycling programs, and demand-driven conservation.