Elsevier

Energy Policy

Volume 61, October 2013, Pages 729-739
Energy Policy

Information strategies and energy conservation behavior: A meta-analysis of experimental studies from 1975 to 2012

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.109Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We conduct a meta-analysis of information-based energy conservation experiments.

  • We analyze 156 published trials and 524,479 study subjects from 1975 to 2012.

  • On average, individuals in the experiments reduced electricity consumption by 7.4%.

  • Individualized feedback via audits and consulting results in the largest reductions.

  • Pecuniary feedback and incentives lead to a relative increase in energy usage.

Abstract

Strategies that provide information about the environmental impact of activities are increasingly seen as effective to encourage conservation behavior. This article offers the most comprehensive meta-analysis of information based energy conservation experiments conducted to date. Based on evidence from 156 published field trials and 525,479 study subjects from 1975 to 2012, we quantify the energy savings from information based strategies. On average, individuals in the experiments reduced their electricity consumption by 7.4%. Our results also show that strategies providing individualized audits and consulting are comparatively more effective for conservation behavior than strategies that provide historical, peer comparison energy feedback. Interestingly, we find that pecuniary feedback and incentives lead to a relative increase in energy usage rather than induce conservation. We also find that the conservation effect diminishes with the rigor of the study, indicating potential methodological issues in the current literature.

Introduction

The environmental impact of everyday activities is often invisible to consumers. Information strategies that aim at correcting this information asymmetry are increasingly common. These include ecolabels (Crespi and Marette, 2005, Leire and Thidell, 2005), and mandatory and voluntary corporate disclosure (Khanna, 2001, Delmas et al., 2010). Information strategies are based on the principle that more and better information about the environmental impact of activities will encourage consumers to conserve. While theory suggests that information programs may be effective, the empirical evidence seems to indicate important differences in effectiveness according to type of information provided and the context in which the information is communicated (Delmas and Grant, 2010, Delmas et al., 2010).

Electricity conservation has been an especially active context for the deployment of information strategies. Energy use accounts for 40% of greenhouse gases across the world and effective conservation programs could contribute to significant environmental improvements. A large number of energy conservation experiments have been conducted using various information strategies to reduce energy use (Abrahamse et al., 2005, Fischer, 2008, Vining and Ebreo, 2002). These include providing users with savings tips, historical individual usage, real time energy usage, peer usage etc. Yet despite the accumulated experimental evidence, analyses of the effectiveness of such strategies have provided mixed results. Some researchers claim that more information has little or no effect on energy use (Abrahamse et al., 2005), while others estimate that information programs could result in energy use reductions on the order of 22 to 30% over the next 5 to 8 years (Laitner et al., 2009, Gardner and Stern, 2008). However, these claims are not backed up by rigorous empirical comparison and include very different types of information strategies.

Information strategies are varied. Pricing information has been widely used to induce individuals to save energy (Battalio et al., 1979, Katzev and Johnson, 1984, Nielsen, 1993, Reiss and White, 2008, Sexton et al., 1987, Slavin et al., 1981). Despite the direct financial benefits of saving energy, research indicates that providing information about the cost of energy use does not necessarily affect energy use behavior among households (Lindén et al., 2006). At the same time, research on the influence of non-price strategies such as peer comparisons (Katzev and Johnson, 1983, McCalley and Midden, 2002, Schultz et al., 2007, Stern, 1992) has highlighted approaches beyond price information that may drive conservation behavior. At this point, an authoritative comparison of price vs. non-price experiments is lacking. Comparing these different approaches may shed light on the debate of what best motivates energy conservation behavior.

In this paper, we compare the impact of different types of information strategies on energy use to strengthen our understanding of energy conservation information-based strategies. Information strategies include savings tips, energy audits, different forms of energy use feedback, and pecuniary strategies. Experiments generally use one, or at most two or three of these strategies, leaving open the question of how these strategies compare overall. We conduct a meta-analysis of existing field experiments to quantify the effect of information strategies on energy conservation. We focus on experiments trying to lower overall consumption (energy conservation) as opposed to shifting usage in time from periods of high demand to off-peak periods (load shifting). We limit our study to residential settings. We build a dataset of experimental studies within economics, psychology and related fields, incorporating all available evidence. We normalize reported effects to reflect mean changes in energy usage between control and treatment groups. We find a significant overall effect of information strategies on energy savings with a weighted average of 7.4%. Our results also show that strategies providing individualized audits and consulting are comparatively more effective for conservation behavior than strategies that provide historical, peer comparison energy feedback and pecuniary feedback. This indicates that information delivered in person might be more effective than information provided through other media such as mail or e-mail. Interestingly, we find that pecuniary feedback tends to lead to a relative increase in energy usage rather than induce conservation. We also observe that the effect differ across studies depending on the rigor of the methodology used. Indeed the savings are down to 2% for the studies of the highest quality that include a control group as well as weather and demographics controls.

Several authors have provided descriptive reviews of this research area, comparing methods used across studies (Abrahamse et al., 2005), discussing factors influencing residential energy conservation (Burgess and Nye, 2008, Steg, 2008), classifying studies by theoretical approach (Fischer, 2008, Vining and Ebreo, 2002), or presenting comparative case studies of residential energy efficiency programs in certain geographic areas (Faruqui et al., 2010, Mullaly, 1998). While providing interesting insights, these qualitative reviews do not constitute a firm basis for estimating the average treatment effect of behavioral energy conservation programs. Our study is the first to quantify the conservation potential of energy conservation information-based strategies and provides insights into the relative effectiveness of different strategies, which has important policy implications for the future design of such programs.

The paper proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we develop hypotheses on the impact of different types of information strategies. In Section 3, we describe the data-collection and meta-regression methodology. In Section 4 we present the results. In Section 5 we outline steps for advancing methods and theory in this field. A conclusion follows.

Section snippets

Understanding levers for energy conservation behavior

The failure to engage in energy efficiency can be characterized as a market failure: individuals lack the relevant information or knowledge to engage in energy saving behaviors (DeYoung, 2000, Hungerford and Volk, 1990, Schultz, 2002) and acquiring such information is costly. Therefore detailed and immediate feedback is a frequently proposed solution to remedy wasteful energy use patterns (Van Houwelingen and Van Raaij, 1989).

We first describe how information about individual energy usage such

Data collection

We used three complementary search strategies to identify relevant field studies for our analysis. First, we consulted prior narrative review articles in energy conservation (e.g., Abrahamse et al., 2005, Darby, 2006, Fischer, 2008, Ehrhardt-Martinez et al., 2010). Second, we did a hand search of cited papers in these reviews. Third, we searched the following online databases: (1) EconLit, (2) PsychINFO, (3) Academic Search Complete, (4) Business Source Complete, (5) JSTOR, (6) GreenFILE, (7)

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations and percentages of all observations and Table 2 presents the correlations. We see that in general, the effect sizes are not strongly correlated with treatment categories presented in Table 2. This is reasonable and to be expected, given that treatment selection is typically randomized. Among the more significant correlations presented in Table 2, we observe that monetary savings information is strongly correlated with both individual and social

Discussion

Our study presents the first quantitative comparison of different information strategies used in studies targeted at energy conversation. At most, individual field experiments reported in the literature compare up to three of the six different strategies evaluated in this article. Our meta-analysis allows for a more expansive comparison, because it accounts for differences in strategies across many field experiments. We test some specific predictions about the effectiveness of information with

Conclusion

In this article, we provide a comparison of the quantitative evidence on behavioral strategies targeting energy usage across various literatures in behavioral psychology, economics and related fields. This study represents the most comprehensive review of experimental energy conservation studies to date. We find an overall treatment effect of 7.4% energy conservation across all experimental studies. Based on these results, we conclude that despite heterogeneous treatment effects, non-monetary,

Acknowledgment

We thank Michael Oppenheim, Rikke Ogawa and Barbara S. Lawrence from UCLA for their support and guidance in developing this manuscript. Funding from the California Air Resources Board # 10-332 and the National Science Foundation #0903720 is also acknowledged.

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