Environmental Data Analysis and Policy

The course will provide an overview of the main behavioral interventions adopted by policy makers and firms in the environmental domain (green nudges), and of evaluations of their impacts. The first part of the course will review the main behavioral factors and biases affecting environmental decisions, and use data to replicate analyses on their impacts. The second part of the course will focus on green nudges, which are increasingly used by private and public sector actors to influence consumers' behavior, and whose effectiveness is commonly evaluated by firms through online A/B tests and big data. Building on their knowledge of behavioral factors and of the effectiveness of green nudges across contexts and decision domains, students will be guided in the design of their own green nudge applied to a real-world problem.

At the end of the course, students will have gained a thorough understanding of how behavioral factors, such as present bias, social preferences and status quo bias, affect decision making in the environmental domain. Students will acquire a comprehensive knowledge of the behavioral interventions that firms and policymakers adopt to nudge individuals to act pro-environmentally, and of their varying effectiveness across decision domains. They will be able to replicate the evaluation of these nudges using big data. Thanks to this knowledge, students will be able to design a behavioral intervention to address a real-world environmental problem and present their solution to their peers and, possibly, to stakeholders.