Real-time feedback promotes energy conservation in the absence of volunteer selection bias and monetary incentives

Tiefenbeck, Verena; Wörner, Anselma; Schöb, Samuel; Fleisch, Elgar; Staake, Thorsten

doi:10.1038/s41560-018-0282-1

Cited by 107 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…In the context of hot water used by tourists in hotel showers, providing instant feedback to the tourists on how many litres they are using while showering leads to tourists shortening their showers (Tiefenbeck et al, 2019). In this study -based on nearly 20,000 instances of real tourists taking a shower in one of 265 hotel rooms -energy use was reduced by 11%.…”

Section: Designing Choice Architecturementioning

confidence: 89%

Designing for more environmentally friendly tourism

Dolničar¹

2020

Preprint

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The environmental (un)sustainability of the tourism industry has been debated for many decades. This debate generated ample empirical evidence of the environmental damage caused by tourism-related human activity. It is underpinned, however, by a passive position: one of largely accepting the tourism industry as it is, and lamenting its negative consequences. An alternative, more active approach, is to deliberately design for environmental sustainability. This article provides examples of how the tourism industry can drive a reduction of environmental damage by actively designing brand-owned touchpoints in a way that entice tourists to behave more environmentally friendly. The article concludes with an overview of promising design approaches and a framework to guide the future design of more environmentally friendly tourism services.

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Section: Designing Choice Architecturementioning

confidence: 89%

Designing for more environmentally friendly tourism

Dolničar¹

2020

Preprint

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“…The benefit of green building programs, while estimated for both commercial and residential buildings [27,28], has yet to be examined for lodging facilities in which consumers may be predominantly driven by hedonic values during travel and thus behave differently in consuming energy as compared with at home or work [29]. Meanwhile, green lodging programs have been proved to help hotel owners save on energy and water expenditure, either via the supply-side change such as the modification of the energy or water supply system or demandside intervention such as increasing the visibility of electricity consumption information to customers [30]. Entrepreneurs may also think of possible new attractions and innovative business models as the current ones may become obsolete as climate conditions change.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Loss of profit in the hotel industry of the United States due to climate change

Qiu

Wang

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Tourism has been identified as a key economic sector vulnerable to climate change, yet direct empirical evidence is still lacking on the economic gain and loss of the tourism industry due to climate change. Here we find that temperature significantly affects the profits of the hotel industry with both spatial and seasonal heterogeneity. By using a rich dataset of the monthly financial records of more than 1700 hotels in 50 US states during 2016-2018 (approximately 3.2% of hotels nationally), we show that a deviation from 18°C ∼20°C in monthly averaged temperature leads to a decrease in the profit rate. The effect is triggered by fewer customers, less revenue, and higher cost per occupied room partially due to the increased usage of electricity and water. Such an effect can be lasting and is less impactful for higher chain scale hotels. In future GHG emission scenarios, climate change will lead to a loss of profit in most climate zones particularly the southern regions, with higher GHG emissions leading to a more serious effect. This study contributes to the literature on how climate change affects human activities and helps refine the relevant damage function of climate change on tourism in existing climate models.

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“…experiment, and particularly the voluntary nature of the experimental sample. It is well-known that voluntary behaviour change processes are affected by polarization that endangers the representativeness of the sample (volunteer selection bias [59,60]): self-selection recruitment strategies tend to raise interest in already motivated subgroups of the general population, frequently individuals with high environmental awareness and pro-environmental attitude who may even have already adopted sustainable consumption patterns, instead of the "mainstream car driver" citizens that the intervention is expected to target. In opt-in frameworks, such as GoEco!, pro-environmental individuals are stimulated to join, looking for confirmations about how good their behavior is, while mainstream citizens simply ignore the invitations.…”

Section: Representativeness Of the Sample: Arementioning

confidence: 99%

A Large Scale, App-Based Behaviour Change Experiment Persuading Sustainable Mobility Patterns: Methods, Results and Lessons Learnt

et al. 2019

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The present urban transportation system, mostly tailored for cars, has long shown its limitations. In many urban areas, public transportation and soft mobility would be able to effectively satisfy many travel needs. However, they tend to be neglected, due to a deep-rooted car dependency. How can we encourage people to make sustainable mobility choices, reducing car use and the related CO 2 emissions and energy consumption? Taking advantage of the wide availability of smartphone devices, we designed GoEco!, a smartphone application exploiting automatic mobility tracking, eco-feedback, social comparison and gamification elements to persuade individual modal change. We tested the effectiveness of GoEco! in two regions of Switzerland (Cantons Ticino and Zurich), in a large-scale, one year long randomized controlled trial. Notwithstanding a large drop-out rate experienced throughout the experiment, GoEco! was observed to produce a statistically significant impact (a decrease in CO 2 emissions and energy consumption per kilometer) for systematic routes in highly car-dependent urban areas, such as the Canton Ticino. In Zurich, instead, where high quality public transport is already available, no statistically significant effects were found. In this paper we present the GoEco! experiment and discuss its results and the lessons learnt, highlighting practical difficulties in performing randomized controlled trials in the field of mobility and providing recommendations for future research.

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Real-time feedback promotes energy conservation in the absence of volunteer selection bias and monetary incentives

Cited by 107 publications

References 41 publications

Designing for more environmentally friendly tourism

Designing for more environmentally friendly tourism

Loss of profit in the hotel industry of the United States due to climate change

A Large Scale, App-Based Behaviour Change Experiment Persuading Sustainable Mobility Patterns: Methods, Results and Lessons Learnt

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