Models of Decision Making and Residential Energy Use

By Charlie Wilson, Hadi Dowlatabadi. Renewable Energy, 2007

575 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research traditions across the social sciences have explored the drivers of individual behavior and proposed different models of decision making. Four diverse perspectives are reviewed here: conventional and behavioral economics, technology adoption theory and attitude-based decision making, social and environmental psychology, and sociology. The individual decision models in these traditions differ axiomatically. Some are founded on informed rationality or psychological variables, and others emphasize physical or contextual factors from individual to social scales. Each perspective suggests particular lessons for designing interventions to change behavior. Throughout the review, these lessons are applied to decisions affecting residential energy use. Examples are drawn from both intuitive and reasoning-based types of decision as well as from a range of decision contexts that include capital investments in weatherization and repetitive behaviors such as appliance use. Areas of difference and similarity be...

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c86fcf6e1cea7a0ddb9b99045ba33cb2c94fed86

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Citations in the corpus

Internal and external barriers to energy efficiency: which role for policy interventions? (2019, background): “This implies that simply framing a decision as a choice between losses rather than a choice between gains can reverse preferences, everything else is equal (Wilson and Dowlatabadi 2007).”
Distributed solar and environmental justice: Exploring the demographic and socio-economic trends of residential PV adoption in California (2019, background): “non-adoption of clean energy technologies (Braito et al., 2017; Caird et al., 2008; Kemp and Volpi, 2008; Wilson and Dowlatabadi, 2007; Li and Yi, 2014), or on developing predictive models of consumer behavior (Robinson and Rai, 2015; Rai and Robinson, 2015; Sultan et al.”
Consumer demand for time of use electricity tariffs: A systematized review of the empirical evidence (2018, background): “Moreover, evidence from fields such as social psychology [50,51], behavioural economics [52] and sociology [53] suggests that people are motivated by a wider range of considerations than just money, as pointed out in another recent review article [54].”
Making the implicit explicit: A look inside the implicit discount rate (2016, background): “9 See Wilson and Dowlatabadi (2007) for an overview of different social science concepts including conventional and behavioral economics, psychology and sociology.”