“Nudges” are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that the popular electricity conservation “nudge” of providing feedback to households on own and peers’ home electricity usage in a home electricity report is two to four times more effective with political liberals than with conservatives. Political conservatives are more likely than liberals to opt out of receiving the home electricity report and to report disliking the report. Our results suggest that energy conservation nudges need to be targeted to be most effective.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We thank Maximilian Auffhammer, the participants at the 2010 POWER Conference, and seminar participants at Princeton and the University of Illinois for comments. We thank the UCLA Ziman Real Estate Center for funding. We thank the editors and five reviewers for their comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w15939
- Published in
- United States of America
