# Reputation-Based Information Design for Inducing Prosocial Behavior

## TL;DR

This paper explores how different types of feedback and information design influence prosocial electricity consumption behavior, highlighting that less information can sometimes promote more prosociality and proposing a privacy-preserving feedback mechanism.

## Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of information design in prosocial behavior induction, including quantized feedback types, mean field equilibrium characterization, and a new privacy-aware feedback method.

## Key findings

- Less informative feedback can enhance prosocial behavior.
- A new flexible quantized feedback improves prosociality while respecting privacy.
- The approach applies to general resource sharing problems.

## Abstract

We study the idea of information design for inducing prosocial behavior in the context of electricity consumption. We consider a continuum of agents. Each agent has a different intrinsic motivation to reduce her power consumption. Each agent models the power consumption of the others via a distribution. Using this distribution, agents will anticipate their reputational benefit and choose a power consumption by trading off their own intrinsic motivation to do a prosocial action, the cost of this prosocial action and their reputation. Initially, the service provider can provide two types of quantized feedbacks of the power consumption. We study their advantages and disadvantages. For each feedback, we characterize the corresponding mean field equilibrium, using a fixed point equation. Besides computing the mean field equilibrium, we highlight the need for a systematic study of information design, by showing that revealing less information to the society can lead to more prosociality. In the last part of the paper, we introduce the notion of privacy and provide a new quantized feedback, more flexible than the previous ones, that respects agents' privacy concern but at the same time improves prosociality. The results of this study are also applicable to generic resource sharing problems.