| Summary: | Traditionally, information has been assumed to never harm
consumers, a notion recently challenged. Salience nudges have been argued to
evoke negative emotions, therefore acting as “emotional taxes”. I design a
hypothetical restaurant meal experiment to analyze the emotional and short-term
consumer welfare impact of a calorie salience nudge (calorie menu labeling) – a
policy implemented nationwide in the U.S. in 2018. I find that a calorie
salience nudge may act as an emotional tax, but only for some – there is
considerable heterogeneity in the emotional response to the nudge. In
particular, the nudge emotionally taxes people with low eating self-control,
while it emotionally subsidizes those with higher levels of eating
self-control. It therefore emotionally taxes the “right” people. However,
people with lower levels of self-control may experience fewer benefits from the
nudge – the nudge causes them to adjust their high calorie meal consumption by
less than do those with higher self-control. It is therefore unsurprising that
consumers with lower self-control attach a lower (a negative) value to the
calorie salience nudge. Overall, the calorie salience nudge positively affects
consumer welfare, although heterogeneity over consumers is substantial – the
consumer value ranges from positive to negative. I find no distributional
effects over income from the calorie salience nudge.
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