Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such “socially responsible consumers” in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational consequentialist consumers. In violation of price taking, equilibrium feedback non-trivially dampens the impact of a person’s consumption on aggregate consumption, undermining the motive to mitigate. This leads to a new type of market failure, where even consumers who fully “internalize the externality” overconsume externality-generating goods. At the same time, socially responsible consumers change the relative effectiveness of taxes, caps, and other policies in lowering the externality. Second, since consumer beliefs about and preferences over their market impacts play a crucial role in our framework, we investigate them empirically via a tailored survey. Consistent with our model, consumers are often consequentialist, and many believe that they have a dampened impact on aggregate consumption. Inconsistent with our model, however, we also find many respondents who expect to have a one-to-one impact on aggregate consumption. Third, therefore, we analyze how such “naive” consumers modify our theoretical conclusions. They consume less than rational consumers in a single-good economy, but may consume more in a multi-good economy with cross-market spillovers. A mix of naive and rational consumers may yield the worst outcomes.

中文翻译：

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了解具有社会责任感的消费者的市场

许多消费者关心气候变化以及与购买相关的其他外部因素。我们分三个部分分析此类“有社会责任的消费者”的行为和市场影响。首先，我们开发了一个灵活的理论框架来研究理性结果主义消费者的竞争均衡。均衡反馈违反了定价原则，极大地抑制了一个人的消费对总消费的影响，削弱了缓解的动机。这导致了一种新型的市场​​失灵，即使是完全“内部化外部性”的消费者也会过度消费产生外部性的商品。与此同时，对社会负责的消费者改变了税收、上限和其他政策在降低外部性方面的相对有效性。其次，由于消费者对其市场影响的信念和偏好在我们的框架中发挥着至关重要的作用，因此我们通过量身定制的调查对它们进行实证调查。与我们的模型一致，消费者往往是结果主义者，许多人认为他们对总消费的影响受到抑制。然而，与我们的模型不一致的是，我们还发现许多受访者希望对总消费产生一对一的影响。因此，第三，我们分析了这些“天真的”消费者如何修改我们的理论结论。在单一商品经济中，他们的消费低于理性消费者，但在具有跨市场溢出效应的多元商品经济中，他们的消费可能会更高。天真和理性的消费者的混合可能会产生最糟糕的结果。