Empirical evidence on households' awareness of electricity prices and potentially divergent demand responses to price changes conditional on price knowledge is scant. Using panel data originating from Germany’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (GRECS), we fill this void by employing an...

To test the localized tastes hypothesis, we use historical dialect similarity as an instrument to predict the persistent component of regional taste differences. Analyzing wholesale markets for fruits and vegetables in Japan, we find that predicted taste differences have a strong, statistically...

This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefits in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary...

While recently more and more research has focused on the aggregate response of consumption to income shocks, little is known about how this response differs for households at different ends of the income distribution. This paper investigates how consumption reacts to transitory and permanent...

Energy labels have been introduced in many countries to increase consumers’ attention to energy use in purchase decisions of durables. In a discrete-choice experiment among about 5,000 households, we implement randomized information treatments to explore how energy labels influence purchasing...

The production of electricity on the basis of renewable energy technologies is a classic example of an impure public good. It is often discriminatively financed by industrial and household consumers, such as in Germany, where the energy-intensive sector benefits from a far-reaching exemption...

Based on a survey among more than 5,000 German households and a single-binary choice experiment in which we randomly split the respondents into two groups, this paper elicits both households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for power supply security and their willingness to accept (WTA) compensations...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular behavioral interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), primarily providing consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback...

According to the German SAVE survey, more than 40 percent of households regularly save fixed amounts rather than flexibly adjusting savings to income variations as assumed by the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH). Fixed amount saving behaviour could thus imply a challenge to PIH-based standard...