Welfare effects of nudges: The emotional tax of calorie menu labeling
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 1
Abstract
Traditionally, information has been assumed to never harm consumers, a notion recently challenged. Salience nudges have been argued to evoke negative emotions, therefore acting as “emotional taxes”. I design a hypothetical restaurant meal experiment to analyze the emotional and short-term consumer welfare impact of a calorie salience nudge (calorie menu labeling) – a policy implemented nationwide in the U.S. in 2018. I find that a calorie salience nudge may act as an emotional tax, but only for some – there is considerable heterogeneity in the emotional response to the nudge. In particular, the nudge emotionally taxes people with low eating self-control, while it emotionally subsidizes those with higher levels of eating self-control. It therefore emotionally taxes the “right” people. However, people with lower levels of self-control may experience fewer benefits from the nudge – the nudge causes them to adjust their high calorie meal consumption by less than do those with higher self-control. It is therefore unsurprising that consumers with lower self-control attach a lower (a negative) value to the calorie salience nudge. Overall, the calorie salience nudge positively affects consumer welfare, although heterogeneity over consumers is substantial – the consumer value ranges from positive to negative. I find no distributional effects over income from the calorie salience nudge.
Authors and Affiliations
Linda Thunström
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678393
- DOI -
- Views 167
- Downloads 0
An IRT forecasting model: linking proper scoring rules to item response theory
This article proposes an Item Response Theoretical (IRT) forecasting model that incorporates proper scoring rules and provides evaluations of forecasters’ expertise in relation to the features of the specific questions t...
A note on neglect defaulting
I introduce the notion of “neglect defaulting,” which labels the propensity to neglect possibilities which are ordinarily sensibly neglected. In familiar contexts we are well-tuned to recognize when to override the defau...
Consumers can make decisions in as little as a third of a second
We make hundreds of decisions every day, many of them extremely quickly and without much explicit deliberation. This motivates two important open questions: What is the minimum time required to make choices with above ch...
Solving stumpers, CRT and CRAT: Are the abilities related?
Bar-Hillel, Noah and Frederick (2018) studied a class of riddles they called stumpers, which have simple, but curiously elusive, solutions. A canonical example is: “Andy is Bobbie’s brother, but Bobbie is not Andy’s brot...
The impact of time limitation: Insights from a queueing experiment
We experimentally explore the effects of time limitation on decision making. Under different time allowance conditions, subjects are presented with a queueing situation and asked to join one of the two given queues. The...