With the increasing popularity of food delivery services in recent years, reducing the use of disposable plastic products such as utensils has become a topic of widespread concern in society. Against this backdrop, regulatory measures were introduced in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin in 2019 and 2020, prohibiting online food delivery platforms from automatically providing disposable utensils unless explicitly requested by customers. To comply with these regulations, Alibaba Group's food delivery platform, Ele.me, made corresponding adjustments to its user interface. It introduced a pop-up window on the ordering interface to prompt customers to specify the number of utensils needed for their order. The default option in this pop-up window was set to "No utensils required." Customers who selected "No utensils required" were rewarded with Ant Forest green energy points. These green energy points do not have monetary value, but enough green energy points can be converted into an opportunity to plant a tree in desert areas of China.
The changes mentioned reflect the concept of "nudging" in behavioral economics and psychology, which involves influencing individual behavior and decision-making by altering the choice architecture or providing indirect information, rather than directly restricting choices, or offering monetary incentives. This concept has been applied in various social domains, including promoting environmentally friendly behaviors through green nudges. However, there is still debate about the extent to which green nudges can be effective.
Using Ele.me's green nudges as a case study, this research extensively and longitudinally investigated the impact of green nudges. The research team utilized user data from Alibaba Group in ten cities from 2019 to 2020 and employed a Difference-in-Differences model and an Event-study Approach to compare the behavioral changes of consumers in cities where the nudges were implemented versus those where they were not.
The research team found that green nudges led to a 20.1 percentage point increase in the proportion of consumers choosing "No utensils required" for their orders. This represented a 6.48-fold increase compared to the pre-nudge period, during which only 3.1% of orders selected "No utensils required." Additionally, the researchers found that green nudges did not significantly impact the number of orders, or the amount of money users spent on the food delivery platform. Furthermore, the researchers estimated that if this green nudging initiative were scaled from pilot cities to nationwide, it could reduce the consumption of disposable utensils by 21.75 billion sets annually, equivalent to avoiding 3.26 million tons of plastic waste and saving 5.44 million trees from being cut down.
Another important finding of this study is that green nudges did not negatively impact Alibaba's business, indicating that green nudges can be a cost-effective tool to promote individual environmentally friendly behaviors. For Alibaba, the cost of implementing green nudges is minimal, as it only requires a few software engineers to redesign the user interface. However, green nudges can generate significant environmental benefits.
Furthermore, the research results suggest that female customers, older customers, frequent users of food delivery services, and higher-income groups responded more positively to green nudges. The effect of green nudges was observed to motivate a large portion of people to change their environmental behaviors, rather than just influencing a small subset of individuals. Additional mechanism analysis indicates that modifications to default options and the design of pop-up windows are the primary drivers of consumer behavioral changes, while the motivating effect of green energy points on consumers is relatively minor.
The study also points out that the conclusions should be interpreted as an upper limit of environmental benefits for two reasons: Firstly, despite customers selecting "No utensils required" when ordering, some merchants still provide disposable utensils. This can occur when merchants are too busy to check each order individually or when they are concerned that customers may have mistakenly chosen the "No utensils required" option. Secondly, customers often waste their green energy points or are unable to accumulate enough green energy points to plant trees.
The research results also help us better understand how individual consumers adjust their behavior. For example, the impact of nudges is most pronounced in the first few months after implementation, and then gradually declines over time, indicating that some customers later decide to change the default "No utensils required" option. This is consistent with the attenuation effect of default options observed in previous literature.
The study also highlights some relevant considerations and future directions. Firstly, due to a lack of data from other food delivery platforms, the paper could not examine whether Alibaba's green nudges had positive spillover effects on transactions on other platforms. If positive spillover effects exist, the benefits of green nudges would be even greater. Secondly, through field investigations, the research team found that some merchants still provide utensils to customers even when they select "No utensils required." This may weaken the power of green nudges and reduce the environmental benefits associated with customer environmental behaviors. In future research, it is necessary to find ways to encourage merchants to better meet customer requirements. Although the overall environmental benefits of green nudges are significant, a considerable portion of solid and plastic waste in the food delivery industry still comes from packaging (i.e., disposable food containers and plastic bags used in delivery services). In a typical Chinese food delivery order, packaging waste may account for over 80% of the total waste generated. To better control the waste generated during the packaging process, additional related policies should be implemented.
The study has significant policy implications. Considering that green nudges can significantly reduce the use of disposable utensils, the study suggests that major food delivery platforms in other countries and regions (such as UberEats, DoorDash, etc.) adopt similar green nudging practices to reduce the generation of global plastic waste. The paper also provides solid scientific evidence for the impact of green nudges on consumer behavior, indicating that platform companies can use economically efficient nudging schemes to achieve more environmentally friendly consumption and production, thereby providing new ideas and directions for corporate ESG practices.
Associate Professor Ho Kwok Chun from the University of Hong Kong, Assistant Professor Pan Yuhang from Peking University, Chief Economist and Professor Albert Park from the Asian Development Bank and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Professor Yasuyuki Sawada from the University of Tokyo, and Elaine S. Tan from the Asian Development Bank are co-first authors of this paper. Ho Kwok Chun is the corresponding author.
This research was supported by the Theme-based Research Scheme Fund from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (T31-603/21-N), the Early Career Research Fund/Subject Construction Fund from Peking University (7101303264), and other funds.
(Interpreted by Waverly Shi)
