Using smart systems to incentivize sustainable behaviors of individuals

Abstract

New technology has created new tools to invest in sustainable development to fight major problems like climate change, inequality, and rebuilding communities after disasters. This new technology has created new sources of data and when coupled with modern data analytic methods, creates a way to measure the sustainable behaviors of individuals. This thesis discusses how the ability to measure sustainable behaviors of individuals creates new ways to incentivize these sustainable behaviors. We developed an app that measures behaviors using data from smartphones to facilitate field experiments that measure the power of incentive mechanisms. We used this app to conduct a pilot study at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in South Australia. This study measured how festival-goers valued the gender diversity of artists and incentivized participants by showing them the actual percentage of women/non-binary artists they saw. We discuss what changes need to be made to this app to enable future studies and propose an experiment that uses an updated version of the app to incentivize tourists to visit communities affected by natural disasters, specifically Kangaroo Island which has been impacted by bushfires and COVID-19.