Social Norms and Energy Conservation Beyond the US

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) show that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective climate policy intervention in the US. Our paper demonstrates the context-dependency of this result. In most industri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of environmental economics and management 2020-09, Vol.103, p.102351, Article 102351
Main Authors: Andor, Mark A., Gerster, Andreas, Peters, Jörg, Schmidt, Christoph M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Energy demand
External validity
Non-price interventions
Randomized field experiments
Social norms
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Summary:The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) show that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective climate policy intervention in the US. Our paper demonstrates the context-dependency of this result. In most industrialized countries, average electricity consumption and carbon intensity are well below US levels. Consequently, HER interventions can only become cost-effective if treatment effect sizes are substantially higher. For Germany, we provide evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial that effect sizes are in fact considerably lower than in the US. We conclude by illustrating that targeting highly responsive subgroups is crucial to reach cost-effectiveness and by identifying the few countries in which HER are promising policy instruments.
ISSN:0095-0696
1096-0449
DOI:10.1016/j.jeem.2020.102351