Abstract
One of the most challenging problems the humanity facing in the coming decades is exhaustion of fossil fuels and environmental consequences from burning them. While countries put investments in developing technology, the role of humans in energy consumption is often underestimated. Human is a complicated social actor, and his decision making regarding energy is formed not only by his individual preferences, but also by his social environment. At the same time there is a conflict between private and social interests that can bring failure in cooperation and considerable free-riding regarding pro-environmental actions. From this point of view this thesis aims at investigation of present achievements from behavioral economics and insights from allied sciences in order to analyze the potential of the environmental policies targeting at groups rather than individuals. For this purpose the results from public good experiments are provided in order to define basic conditions increasing the cooperation, followed by a theoretical model covering the social norm factor. The observations from the experiments and predictions from the model can have an implication for the policy makers designing an energy conservation or environmental friendliness campaigns. In particular the main advantage that may be achieved by this policy is highlighted: expected long-lasting effect and opportunity to achieve permanent shift to environmentally friendly behavior without strict external control.