Social Norms and Energy Conservation Beyond the US

By Mark A. Andor, Andreas Gerster, Jörg Peters, Christoph M. Schmidt. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2020

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42bd467c24cae46ea78c11bcf39dfe5b6da14469