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Participating in a climate prediction market increases concern about global warming

Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 523–531 (2023)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 15 June 2023

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Abstract

Modifying attitudes and behaviours related to climate change is difficult. Attempts to offer information, appeal to values and norms or enact policies have shown limited success. Here we examine whether participation in a climate prediction market can shift attitudes by having the market act as a non-partisan adjudicator and by prompting participants to put their ‘money where their mouth is’. Across two field studies, we show that betting on climate events alters: (1) participants’ concern about climate change, (2) support for remedial climate action and (3) knowledge about climate issues. While the effects were dependent on participants’ betting performance in Study 1, they were independent of betting outcomes in Study 2. Overall, our findings suggest that climate prediction markets could offer a promising path to changing people’s climate-related attitudes and behaviour.

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Fig. 1: Experimental design.
Fig. 2: Distributions of climate beliefs before and after participating in the climate market.
Fig. 3: Effects of condition on climate concern and support.
Fig. 4: Climate knowledge increases after participating in a climate prediction market.

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Data availability

The data generated during the work are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PH72Y.

Code availability

The codes used for the analyses are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PH72Y.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Kim and A. Yu for assistance with managing the prediction market and maintaining the study throughout the betting periods; A. Mishra and I. Katz for designing and coding an initial version of the online prediction markets; J. McCoy for discussion on prediction market utility; B. B. McShane, S. Franconeri, J. N. Druckman and A. Coughlan for comments on the manuscript; E. Weber for support with climate concern assessment; G. Schmidt, K. Hayhoe, D. Horton, E. Berlow and K. Marvel for help with identifying climate markets; and R. Behnam and members of the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission for discussions on federal implementation of climate prediction markets. This work was funded by the Columbia University Tamer Center for Social Enterprise (M.C. and S.C.M.) and by the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (M.C. and M.A.M.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Moran Cerf & Sandra C. Matz

  2. McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Malcolm A. MacIver

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Malcolm A. MacIver

  4. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Malcolm A. MacIver

  5. Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Malcolm A. MacIver

  6. Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Malcolm A. MacIver

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  1. Moran Cerf
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All authors equally designed the research, performed the research, analysed the data and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Moran Cerf, Sandra C. Matz or Malcolm A. MacIver.

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Cerf, M., Matz, S.C. & MacIver, M.A. Participating in a climate prediction market increases concern about global warming. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 523–531 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01679-4

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