Session 2A: Changing Views on Climate Change by Turning the Temporal Discounting Problem into a Financial Problem
Session Number
Session 2A: 4th Presentation
Advisor(s)
Moran Cerf, Northwestern University
Location
Room A147
Start Date
28-4-2017 10:00 AM
End Date
28-4-2017 11:15 AM
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to see whether having people bet money on positions related to climate change would cause them to become more informed about climate change, potentially resulting in betting in a direction opposite to their beliefs. This was done using a prediction market designed for this study, called “C-hedge” (for ‘Climate Hedge’), where individuals bet game money on the probability that events would occur in the real world in order to translate thinking about the future into a financial activity. Participants were selected from 11 different US states and were tasked with completing a preliminary survey and then a post survey after using the C-Hedge website for one month. Both surveys had a knowledge portion that had factual questions relating to climate change and the post survey had additional information relating to the topics that were on the website. After looking at the results, there was a 9% increase in accuracy on the post survey when compared to the preliminary survey. Additionally, participants were about 20% more accurate on the new knowledge presented than in the preliminary survey. Conservatives did not perform significantly worse than liberals on all aspects of the survey (p < 0.05, t-test), however conservatives scored better when answering questions pertaining to new knowledge (p > 0.05). As hypothesized, the majority of all participants did not invest their money as strongly as their stated liberal or conservative beliefs on the survey would predict. This study gives an alternative view to climate change that reduces the challenge of temporal discounting into a tangible financial computation, which policymakers can use to offset the potential crisis of disbelieving in climate change by using money to short the problem and build better safeguards for it, to encourage active learning of facts about climate, or to demonstrate the dissonance between the talking points of individuals and their actual choices when money is on the line.
Session 2A: Changing Views on Climate Change by Turning the Temporal Discounting Problem into a Financial Problem
Room A147
The purpose of this study was to see whether having people bet money on positions related to climate change would cause them to become more informed about climate change, potentially resulting in betting in a direction opposite to their beliefs. This was done using a prediction market designed for this study, called “C-hedge” (for ‘Climate Hedge’), where individuals bet game money on the probability that events would occur in the real world in order to translate thinking about the future into a financial activity. Participants were selected from 11 different US states and were tasked with completing a preliminary survey and then a post survey after using the C-Hedge website for one month. Both surveys had a knowledge portion that had factual questions relating to climate change and the post survey had additional information relating to the topics that were on the website. After looking at the results, there was a 9% increase in accuracy on the post survey when compared to the preliminary survey. Additionally, participants were about 20% more accurate on the new knowledge presented than in the preliminary survey. Conservatives did not perform significantly worse than liberals on all aspects of the survey (p < 0.05, t-test), however conservatives scored better when answering questions pertaining to new knowledge (p > 0.05). As hypothesized, the majority of all participants did not invest their money as strongly as their stated liberal or conservative beliefs on the survey would predict. This study gives an alternative view to climate change that reduces the challenge of temporal discounting into a tangible financial computation, which policymakers can use to offset the potential crisis of disbelieving in climate change by using money to short the problem and build better safeguards for it, to encourage active learning of facts about climate, or to demonstrate the dissonance between the talking points of individuals and their actual choices when money is on the line.