Sustainability conference of the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
ConPolicy moderates conference
Sustainability and climate policy have gained significantly more political attention in recent months. The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) has also set itself the goal of advancing sustainable development in the areas of agriculture and food.
Today, German Federal Minister Julia Klöckner hosts a conference to present and critically discuss the measures of the BMEL and to develop new solutions for the multitude of issue areas. The conference is attended by more than 300 people from business, civil society, politics and academia. ConPolicy Managing Director Prof. Dr. Christian Thorun is moderating the event.
New publication
How green default nudges and environmental attitudes influence sustainable choices
Green default nudges are considered as an instrument to promote sustainable consumption decisions. The environmental attitude and environmental awareness of consumers is also used repeatedly to predict sustainable behavior.
For the interaction of these two factors (defaults and attitude) ConPolicy project manager Dr. Max Vetter and Dr. Oliver Taube from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories now published an experimental study. They were able to show that the actual consumption decisions in a simulated shopping experiment were independently determined by the default and the environmental attitudes of the participants, while the decision to accept a green default was influenced by the environmental attitude.
The study, entitled "How green defaults promote environmentally friendly decisions: attitude-conditional default acceptance and attitude-unconditional effects on actual choices" has been published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and is available here.
ULD Summer Academy
ConPolicy input presentation on "Privacy – the new organic?!"
As in every year, the Independent State Centre for Data Protection (ULD) Schleswig-Holstein is hosting its Summer Academy. This year, the focus is on consumer privacy challenges and solutions.
In his presentation "Privacy – the new organic?!", ConPolicy Managing Director Prof. Dr. Christian Thorun explored which parallels exist between the two topics and how we could transfer the knowledge gained in decades of research on sustainable/organic consumption to the more recent concept of data privacy. He argued that both issues face a sharp discrepancy between what people think is important and how they actually behave. Therefore, the aim must be to learn from behavioral science in order to close this intention-behavior gap. He showed how this could be done with a range of examples. His presentation can be found here (in German).
Publication of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation
Position paper: Safety, self-determination, fairness and participation
Against the background of the impact of digitalization on consumers’ everyday life, a project group under the umbrella of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation addressed the question of what these changes imply for consumer policy. The key results of the project group were condensed in a position paper and are presented today at a public event of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin.
A wide range of experts participated in the project group over a period of one year. The resulting report was empirically routed and edited by Dr. Robert Philipps (Head of the research group ‘Consumer Policy') from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation as well as by ConPolicy team members Prof. Dr. Christian Thorun, Dr. Julius Rauber and Dr. Sara Elisa Kettner. The report can be found here.
Consumer policy news
Sustainability
New eco-design measures to increase sustainability of consumer products
Today, the European Commission adopted new eco-design regulations to improve energy efficiency and other requirements for ten different product…
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Digitalization
Consumers report frequent problems with their Internet connection
The market watchdogs Digital World at the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (vzbv) published a representative survey on the quality of…
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Consumer protection
Fading confidence in politics when it comes to consumer protection
Today, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (vzbv) published its Consumer Report 2019, which examines consumer satisfaction at the mid-term…
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