The impact of information intervention on urban residents' willingness to sort domestic waste.

Although many studies have assessed the effectiveness of waste sorting policies, few studies have explored residents' waste sorting behavior from the perspective of information intervention as a nudge. This study conducts an online survey to empirically examine the effects of information intervention on residents' willingness to sort domestic waste in urban China. We design and implement three types of randomized information interventions (positive, negative, and neutral) to 720 residents in the city of Beijing. Results from ordered probit models show that, despite the large amount of intervention-related policy context that the sampled subjects already possess before the intervention, information intervention can still effectively improve urban residents' willingness to sort domestic waste, and that the information framing effect exists. Specifically, while neutral information intervention does not affect urban residents' willingness to sort domestic waste, both positive and negative information interventions improve residents' willingness to sort domestic waste, and positive information intervention has a stronger effect. These effects are heterogeneous depending on gender, age, and income of residents, with the effect in male, young-age, and low-income groups stronger than that of female, old-age, and high-income groups respectively.