Social Norms and Energy Conservation Beyond the US

Abstract

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), andRogers (2014) suggest that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective non-price intervention to stimulate energy conservation. The present paper demonstrates the context-dependency of this result. We show that, outside the US, electricity consumption levels and carbon intensities are typically much lower and, hence, HER interventions can only become cost-effective when treatment effect sizes are substantially higher. Yet, our evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial in Germany suggests that effect sizes are actually much lower than in the US.

Social Norms Based Eco-Feedback for Household Water Consumption

“…This may be because water consumption in the UK is generally lower than that found in the US and Colombia, so there is less scope for improvement. This is similar to the findings in energy-focused interventions, that effect sizes in Europe are smaller than those in the US, due to the lower energy consumption in Europe [24,25]. The average water consumption of an individual living in the US is around 400 L per day, whereas in the UK it is 141 L per day.…”

“…The intervention was found to reduce household energy consumption by around 2.2%. The intervention has since been conceptually replicated across other countries but was found to have smaller effect sizes in Germany [24] and Italy [25]. Similarly, this approach has also effectively reduced household water consumption by around 4% in the US and Colombia [26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

“…In the case of true nonzero effects, the distribution of p-values should be right-skewed (with a decreasing density), with more low values (0.01) than higher values (0.04) (Hung et al 1997). 4 In contrast, in bodies of empirical literature suffering from publication bias, or " p-hacking" in their terminology, in which researchers evaluate significance as they collect data and only report results with statistically significant effects, the distribution of p-values would be left-skewed (assuming that researchers stop searching across specifications or collecting data once the desired level of significance is achieved).…”

“…Other psychology researchers have tried another way to crowdsource replication: instead of bringing different research groups together to all independently run the same classic experiment, other researchers have independently analyzed the same observational data set and attempted to answer the same question, in this case, the question of whether darker skintoned soccer players receive more red cards as a result of their race, conditional on other factors (Silberzahn and Uhlmann 2015). 4 3 h t t p : / / w w w. 3 i e i m p a c t . o r g / e v a l u a t i o n / impact-evaluation-replication-programme/.…”

The social multiplier of environmental policy: Application to carbon taxation

“…In addition, the social-network simulations makes possible an analysis of how core social characteristics, such as the strength of social inuence in the formation of preferences, the distribution of tastes, the topology of the social network, and the distribution of income inuence the eectiveness of a carbon tax. A precise description of the context in which social interactions happen, through network modelling, can deal with relevant contextual factors that aect the social multiplier and are bound to dier between regions and countries (Andor et al, 2020).…”