Consumer Inattention, Heuristic Thinking and the Role of Energy Labels

Abstract

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Equity and the willingness to pay for green electricity in Germany

“…814 respondents abandoned the survey prior to the experiment, which corresponds to a dropout rate of 7.2%. This rate is in line with other studies that are based on this household panel, see e. g. Andor et al (2017a). The descriptive statistics reported in Table 1 indicate that randomization was successful and that selection bias is not an issue: with a few exceptions, socio-economic characteristics are very similar across experimental groups, as is reflected by t-test statistics for the mean differences in the covariates that are statistically not significantly different from zero.…”

Equity and The Willingness to Pay for Green Electricity: Evidence from Germany

“…814 respondents abandoned the survey prior to the experiment, which corresponds to a dropout rate of 7.2%. This rate is in line with other studies that are based on this household panel, see e. g. Andor et al (2017a). As can be seen from Note: t-test statistics for mean differences between the control group and the treatment groups are in parentheses.…”

Narrowing the Energy Efficiency Gap: The Impact of Educational Programs, Online Support Tools and Energy-Related Investment Literacy

“…These are often also referred to as 'deliberation cost' (Pingle, 2015), a concept that is closely interrelated with the concept of 'bounded rationality' (Simon, 1959;Sanstad and Howarth, 1994) which reflects that information acquisition is costly and the processing of information is cognitively burdensome. Consequently, boundedly rational individuals tend to not optimize when making an investment decision but to follow simple rules of thumb or decision-making heuristics (Wilson and Dowlatabadi, 2007;Frederiks et al, 2015;Andor et al, 2017).…”

“…Further, we are interested to study how to empower consumers to overcome this irrationality. If a consumer has a low level of energy-related investment literacy, the probability increases that he or she may use heuristic decisionmaking rather then performing a lifetime cost calculation when choosing between two appliances (Andor et al, 2017). A higher level of energy-related investment literacy, instead, can make such a calculation substantially 'less costly' for the consumer, which raises the chances that the individual will optimize over the lifetime cost of an appliance.…”