Preliminary Conference Programme

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, requiring collaborative action across public and private actors. However, we know little about how (public-private) collaborations can potentially act as stewards of systemic change. We adopt a system perspective to examine how collaborations translate into environmental potential and conduct fixed-effects regression with 1,992 European climate-tech companies (2000-2023), along with several robustness checks to mitigate concerns about endogeneity. We link company and collaboration data with a forward-looking Emission Reduction Potential (ERP) metric, capturing the yearly potential reduction (percentage) in emissions to incumbent baselines. Three main findings emerge: First, system embeddedness through collaboration stock is positively associated with ERP, with effects being stronger in the company's early life. Second, public-private collaboration shows directionally higher ERP, with the strongest associations found in government laboratories and agencies. Third, collaboration stock today predicts additional collaboration partners tomorrow, consistent with reinforcing system dynamics. We contribute to the literature on collaboration and public-private collaborations in the context of grand challenges by reframing collaboration as a dynamic systems strategy and by linking ties to a forward-looking environmental potential. The evidence further informs practitioners seeking to design a collaboration system to accelerate decarbonization and combat climate change.

As wine producers and retailers alike aim to market more sustainable wines, sustainability labeling of wines has proliferated in an attempt to influence consumers. We investigate the effect of such sustainability labeling on consumers’ inclination to buy sustainable wines. We conduct a unique, large-scale natural field experiment with the Norwegian retailer Vinmonopolet covering all online wine purchases in the entire Norwegian market. This allows us to study the effect of a positive binary sustainability label through 2.5 years of transactions, including one year of treatment. The dataset includes over 6.1 million products sold and over 158 million USD in revenue. Our results show no significant label effect, with post-tests indicating insufficient label salience for consumers. Therefore, we conduct a follow-up online survey experiment in the style of Vinmonopolet’s online store to test more salient positive and negative binary label designs. We find that with increased label salience (recall and understanding), both negative and positive binary labeling can affect consumers’ purchase intention. Label color and consumers’ sustainability values can play an important role in label effectiveness. Our study thus sheds light on factors determining labeling effectiveness for sustainability and has managerial implications for companies that aim to market more sustainable wines.

This study examines how social identity appeals can influence pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in public settings. An online experiment with UK Premier League supporters (N = 900) tested the effects of ingroup versus outgroup identity appeals on recycling intentions. Across all conditions, reported intentions were high (>88%), with no consistent advantage for ingroup appeals. To assess real behavior, we tested the same group identity-based recycling interventions in a football season-long field experiment at a Norwegian Premier Division stadium (N = 5,712), where visiting fans from 14 clubs were exposed to either an ingroup or an outgroup appeal. Results showed that ingroup appeals alone did not significantly increase recycling rates. However, when combined with a visible group-level social comparison framed as inter-club competition, recycling rates nearly tripled. Two follow-up experiments (N = 3,063) confirmed the key psychological mechanism: a motivation to contribute to the ingroup's success. These findings demonstrate that leveraging social identities can increase PEB in public settings, offering a novel theoretical link and practical strategies to encourage sustainable consumer behavior.