We document how imperfect information generates heterogeneous effects in information treatments with personalized high-frequency feedback and peer comparisons. In our field experiment in retail electricity, we find that high and low energy users symmetrically underestimate and overestimate their relative energy use pre-treatment. Responses to personalized feedback, however, are asymmetric. Households that overestimate their relative use and low users both respond by consuming more. These boomerang effects provide evidence that peer-comparison information programs, even those coupled with normative comparisons, are not guaranteed to lead to increases in prosocial behavior.

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This article reports a research finding that lesbians in Australia earn an unexplained wage premium of 0%–13%, whereas gay men experience an unexplained negative wage gap of 8%–18%. Based on data from the Australian household panel Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, the article is the first to establish these gaps in Australia, and to examine the degree to which credence can be afforded to claims that endowments such as personality traits may help explain such wage differentials. Using ordinary least squares and Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition methods, the study explicitly includes the battery of Big Five personality traits in wage regressions and estimates the contribution of endowments and returns to these traits. The finding is that personality traits and returns to them do not differ along lines of sexual orientation. Gay men in particular suffer a substantial unexplained wage penalty in the workplace. Such unexplained differences suggest that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, though unlawful, may exist in Australia.

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Information programs that leverage peer comparisons are used to encourage pro-social behavior in many contexts. We document how imperfect information generates heterogenous responses to treatments involving personalized feedback and peer comparisons. In our field experiment in retail electricity, we find that most households either overestimate or underestimate their relative energy consumption pre-treatment. Households that overestimated respond to new information by temporarily increasing electricity consumption, whereas households that underestimated take steps that lead to long term energy conservation. We explore the implications of these results for the external validity and design of information programs.