Do not trash the incentive!
Subtitle: Monetary incentives and waste sorting
By: Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari, Marco Piovesan
Contributors: Montinari, Natalia; Piovesan, Marco; Harvard Business School
Series: Working paper / Harvard Business School -- 11-093; Working paper (Harvard Business School) -- 11-093.
Publisher: Harvard Business School
Published: 2011
Place of publication: [Boston]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 31
Description: This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the pricing systems experienced during the 1999-2008 decade by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a panel analysis that pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) incentive-based schemes increase by 12.2% the ratio of sorted to total waste. This increase reflects a change in the behavior of households, who keep unaltered the production of total waste but sort it to a larger extent. In addition, we show that several factors that may discourage local administrators from adopting PAYT - illegal dumping and higher cost of management - are not important at the aggregate level. Hence, our results support the use of PAYT as an effective tool to increase waste sorting.
Notes: "March 2011"--Publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references.