Tatiana A. Homonoff

Who they are

Homonoff works on economic policy and behaviour. This site draws on one paper, the 2018 study.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Can small incentives have large effects? (2018). In January 2012 Montgomery County in Maryland introduced a five-cent tax on each disposable shopping bag. Before the tax, half of the largest grocery chains in the Washington metropolitan area already gave a five-cent bonus for each reusable bag a customer brought. Observers stood at store exits and recorded the number and type of bags used by each customer, in randomised half-hour shifts. The final sample was 16,251 customers across 16 stores in Montgomery County, Washington, D.C. and Arlington County, Virginia, supplemented by shopper surveys and scanner data.

The tax decreased disposable bag use by more than forty percentage points. The bonus generated virtually no effect on behaviour. The paper describes these results as consistent with a model of loss aversion.

Key ideas

The study is one of the cleanest consumer tests of loss aversion outside a laboratory. The money involved was identical, five cents per bag, and only its framing differed: a fee paid for a disposable bag, or a reward earned for a reusable one. Only the fee changed what shoppers did. That pattern is what prospect theory predicts if a small loss weighs more than an equal gain.

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