Energy Conservation “Nudges” and Environmentalist Ideology: Evidence From a Randomized Residential Electricity Field Experiment

Abstract

Abstract"Nudges" are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that the popular electricity conservation "nudge" of providing feedback to households on own and peers' home electricity usage in a home electricity report is two to four times more effective with political liberals than with conservatives. Political conservatives are more likely than liberals to opt out of receiving the home electricity report and to report disliking the report. Our results suggest that energy conservation nudges need to be targeted to be most effective. (JEL: Q41, D03, D72)

Information strategies and energy conservation behavior: A meta-analysis of experimental studies from 1975 to 2012

“…1, we see a high degree of symmetry (no major truncation about the vertical axis) in our group of studies, which suggests that publication bias is likely not a significant issue in this literature. More generally, we observe strong evidence for heterogeneous responses to behavioral treatments, consistent with prior literature (see Costa and Kahn, 2010;Freedman, 2006). …”

“…This advanced meta-analysis method addresses statistical issues of heterogeneity (Field, 2001;Lipsey and Wilson, 2001;Nelson and Kennedy, 2009). Heterogeneity in this context occurs when effect sizes in primary studies do not consistently converge to a central population mean, which is certainly the case in energy conservation studies with heterogeneous treatment effects (see Alcott, 2011;Costa and Kahn, 2010). A key advantage of meta-regression analysis is the ability to model excess heterogeneity in effect size distributions, particularly when combining empirical evidence across groups of studies.…”

Behavioral Environmental Economics: Promises and Challenges

“…Yet, it seems difficult to precisely anticipate such effects for many possible policy interventions across various domains, and for every segment of the population concerned by the regulation. To illustrate, Costa and Kahn (2013) show empirically the role of ideology; political liberals (and/or environmentalists) are much more likely to respond to energy conservation nudges than are conservatives.…”

Saving power to conserve your reputation? The effectiveness of private versus public information

“…Surveys of the existing feedback literature report savings from 4 to 12 percent, with the highest savings coming from real-time feedback (Abrahamse et al, 2005;Darby, 2006;Delmas et al, 2013;Ehrhardt-Martinez et al, 2010). However, not all results are this positive, and many studies have found no statistically significant reduction (Allen and Janda, 2006;Klos et al, 2008;Kihm et al, 2010), increased usage (Sexton et al, 1987;Sulyma et al, 2008) and heterogeneous responses (Van Houwelinger Jeannet and Fred Van Raaij, 1989;Brandon and Lewis, 1999;Parker et al, 2008;Costa and Kahn, 2013). Moreover many of these studies suffer from methodological difficulties (Delmas et al, 2013).…”