Good Boy Here or Bad Boy Far Away? Effects of Digital Nudging on Booking Decisions in Car Sharing

The use of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and car-sharing is one way to reduce local and (potentially) global transport emissions. In order to increase the use of electric vehicles in car-sharing, this work attempts to examine the effect of framing on car selection within the booking process users encounter in car-sharing. An online questionnaire (N = 83) with five different framing conditions (positive and negative goal framing, local or global focus of consequences) was used. For each of the different conditions, the individual, subjective utility of the BEV compared to a combustion vehicle was determined in a total of 80 trials. For this purpose, the participants were asked to make decisions either for the combustion engine vehicle (CV) or the BEV, whereby the prices and their relationship to each other were systematically varied. This study is based on behavioral economic paradigms. Ecological awareness was also assessed. It became clear that positive goal framing has an influence on decisions favoring BEVs in car-sharing. No significant effects could be found regarding the local vs global framing. The results show a main effect of the framing condition as well as for the ecological awareness. However, the interaction between framing (all conditions) and ecological awareness was not significant. The study also showed that the positive framing condition led to a higher subjective utility of the electric vehicle.