While instruments to price congestion exist since the 1970s, less than a dozen cities around the world have a cordon or zone pricing scheme. Geneva, Switzerland, may be soon joining them. This paper builds on a detailed review of the existing schemes to identify a set of plausible design options for the Geneva congestion charge. In turn, it analyzes their acceptability, leveraging a large survey of residents of both Geneva and the surrounding areas of Switzerland and France. Our original approach combines a discrete choice experiment with randomized informational treatments. We consider an extensive set of attributes, such as perimeter, price and price modulation, use of revenues, and exemption levels and beneficiaries. The informational treatments address potential biased beliefs concerning the charge’s expected effects on congestion and pollution. We find that public support depends crucially on the policy design. We identify an important demand for exemptions, which, albeit frequently used in the design of environmental taxation, is underexplored in the analysis of public support. This demand for exemptions is not motivated by efficiency reasons. It comes mostly by local residents, for local residents. Further, people show a marked preference for constant prices, even if efficiency would point to dynamic pricing based on external costs. Hence, we highlight a clear trade-off between efficiency and acceptability. However, we also show, causally, that this gap can in part be closed, with information provision. Analyzing heterogeneity, we show that preferences vary substantially with where people live and how they commute. Even so, we identify several designs that reach majority support.

虽然自 1970 年代以来就存在对拥堵进行定价的工具，但全球只有不到十几个城市制定了警戒线或区域定价方案。瑞士日内瓦可能很快就会加入他们的行列。本文基于对现有方案的详细审查，以确定一组合理的日内瓦拥堵费设计方案。反过来，它利用对日内瓦以及瑞士和法国周边地区的居民进行的大规模调查，分析了他们的可接受性。我们最初的方法将离散选择实验与随机信息处理相结合。我们考虑了一系列广泛的属性，例如周界、价格和价格调制、收入的使用以及豁免水平和受益人。信息处理解决了有关收费对拥堵和污染的预期影响的潜在偏见。我们发现公众支持在很大程度上取决于政策设计。我们确定了一项重要的豁免需求，尽管它经常用于环境税的设计，但在公共支持分析中并未得到充分探索。这种豁免需求并非出于效率原因。它主要来自当地居民，为当地居民。此外，人们对固定价格表现出明显的偏好，即使效率会指向基于外部成本的动态定价。因此，我们强调了效率和可接受性之间的明确权衡。然而，我们也因果地表明，通过提供信息，这种差距可以部分缩小。异质性分析，我们表明，偏好随人们居住的地方和通勤方式的不同而有很大差异。即便如此，我们还是确定了几种获得多数支持的设计。