Untapped improvements in energy efficiency in the residential sector may deliver large savings in energy use and the CO2 associated emissions. Yet empirical assessments have been difficult and controversial. We collect monthly natural gas meter readings from a sample of homes in Transcarpathia,...

This field experiment quantifies the impact of social norm information on the demand for indoor temperature. Based on high-frequency data from indoor temperature monitors, we provide participating households with a comparison of average temperature in their apartments relative to that measured...

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) suggest that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective non-price intervention to stimulate energy conservation. The present paper demonstrates the context-dependency...

Drawing on the most recent wave of the German Residential Energy Survey (GRECS), this paper estimates the contribution of individual appliances to household electricity consumption. Moving beyond the standard focus of estimating mean effects, we combine the conditional demand approach with...

We conduct a large scale randomized field experiment to study whether providing recipients - 42,454 Chinese households in a rural area - with information on the costs of a real decision they make can help to improve the quality of their choices. The decisions are of high financial impact, as the...

This report reviews the literature on the impact of real-time information provision on consumer decision-making. In addition, it describes the results of a study in which about 7000 households in Ontario, Canada were provided with in-home displays linked to smart meters that provided real-time...

In the current paper, we quantify the effect that fuel prices have on vehicle prices' responsiveness to fuel economy. We apply a hedonic price model to the German automobile market by using data on detailed technical specifications of high-sales vehicles of three sequential model years. In the...

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are...

Quantifying heterogeneity in consumers' misperceptions of product costs is crucial for policy design. We illustrate this point in the energy context and the design of Pigouvian policies. We estimate non-parametric distributions of perceptions of energy costs in the U.S. appliance market using a...

Improvements in cars' fuel efficiency may induce people to travel more, taking back some of the potential fuel savings. This behavior, known as the (direct) rebound effect, has received much attention in the literature. However, no consensus has been reached regarding its size or the methodology...