Recent advancements in consumer studies have departed from the assumption that consumers make their decisions in isolation, based only on individual preferences and attitudes. The economics, psychology and sociology literature has been focusing on the impact of social embeddedness (i.e., of constraints due to the social context where economic activities take place) (
Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours related to food waste and willingness to consider different opinions, in order to assess how social interactions can affect private behaviours. Compared to existing models of opinion dynamics, we innovate by including a range of ``cognitive dissonance'' between stated opinions and actual behaviours that consumers are willing to accept before changing one of the two. We calibrate the model using questionnaire data on household food waste in Italy. We find that a limited degree of mixing between different socio-demographic groups, namely adult and young consumers, is enough to trigger change, but a certain openness of mind is required from more wasteful individuals. Equally, a small group of environmentally committed consumers can attract a sizeable share of the population towards low-waste behaviours if they show a certain variability of opinions and are willing to compromise with individuals in their close neighbourhood in terms of opinions. These findings can help design effective interventions to promote pro-environmental behaviours, taking advantage of the beneficial network effects while anticipating negative externalities.
Despite decades of investment in widening access to improved sanitation, much of the world still lacks access to functional sanitation facilities. Through much of the Global South, toilets are inoperable and often abandoned. Failure to understand and account for the whole-life cost of sanitation infrastructure, as well as the interplay between context-specific socio-economic determinants, is one explanation for this reduction in the service life of shared sanitation infrastructure. This issue is especially salient in school-based and communal facilities in middle- to low-income countries. Drawing on a case study of a sanitation facility in a government school in rural south India, we explore the relationship between user value, community-based capacity, and external support in determining the costs of operating and maintaining sanitation facilities over their lifetime. We develop a scenario-based life-cycle cost assessment methodology to examine the relational impact of these determinants on the ‘real’ cost of shared sanitation infrastructure. The analysis concludes that investment and interventions that stimulate demand and enhance the capacity of a community are the most cost-effective options for ensuring the sustainability of sanitation facilities in our case study site. We then reflect on the applicability and limitations of these findings for a wider range of communal sanitation facilities.
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