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Experimental economics research shows that gender can often explain some of the variation in individual behavior in experiments. This is especially true for contextualized games (corruption, environmental protection) in which participants’ behavior is guided by homegrown values and predispositions. We examine the gender differences in environmental behavior and the sharing of payoffs between a farmer and a water user under two alternative property rights assignments (farmer/polluter vs. water user/victim) and three methods of feedback (inducing empathy vs. imposing fine vs. no feedback). We found mixed evidence of gender differences concerning the choice of levels of pollution. Overall, albeit not always statistically significant, it seems that females are sharing with their group members more than males. Specifically, the results suggest that females are often more empathetic than males when they are in a position of a victim (water user). In a position of a polluter (farmer), in contrast, females and males are almost equally empathetic. Overall imposing monetary fines is counterproductive and decreases environmentally friendly behavior (however it does not significantly affect sharing), while empathy nudging increases sharing behavior (however it does not significantly affect environmentally friendly behavior). Empathy nudging is more effective for females than for males. Imposing fines, however, has no significant gender effect for either conservation or sharing behavior. Our findings provide another argument for increased gender equality based on environmentally sustainable economic development and thus propose a push by national governments as well as international organizations to increase the economic role of women.

Common-pool resources and other shared resources frequently suffer from overextraction/overuse and associated negative externalities. In this paper we design a framed laboratory experiment on downstream water pollution to investigate (a) the importance of empathy vs. self-interest framing in determining the behavior of upstreamers regarding the negative externalities, and (b) the potential of downstreamers to influence the choices of upstreamers using non-monetary sanctions and rewards, alleviating the need for intervention by the local governments and regulatory institutions. Our results show that empathy framing has a much more significant impact on individual behavior than self-interest framing. Overall subjects behaved more profit-oriented in the self-interest framing and more egalitarian in the empathy framing. Lastly, negative emotional feedback is a powerful tool for changing behavior of subjects towards more environmentally friendly actions. Interestingly, positive emotional feedback is counterproductive for that. In general our results indicate that explicit emotional feedback, even though not expressed by everyone, works to the same degree as the implicit appeal to emotions through framing.