Consumers' Response to State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Programs

Houde, Sébastien; Aldy, Joseph E.

doi:10.1257/pol.20140383

Cited by 52 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The average rebate amount was $128, and the state rebates varied from $50 to $600. Some programs lasted for only one day (e.g., Illinois and Texas); the longest‐running program was in Alaska, and lasted 639 days (Houde and Aldy, ).…”

Section: Data and Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

How consumers respond to product certification and the value of energy information

Houde

2018

The RAND J of Economics

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I study how consumers respond to competing pieces of information that differ in their degree of complexity and informativeness. In particular, I study the choice of refrigerators in the United States, where a mandatory disclosure labelling program provides detailed information about energy cost, and a certification labelling program provides a simple binary-star rating related to energy use. I find that the coarse certification may help some consumers to pay attention to energy information, but for others, it may crowd out efforts to process more accurate, but complex, energy information. The effect of the certification on overall energy use is thus ambiguous. * ETH Zürich, Switzerland; shoude@ethz.ch. I am indebted to

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Section: Data and Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

How consumers respond to product certification and the value of energy information

Houde

2018

The RAND J of Economics

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“…First, the literature has found that these policy instruments are associated with a rebound effect (Alberini et al, 2016), whereby potential savings are wiped out by changes in people's behaviour. Second, they encourage free-riding (Houde and Aldy, 2017). Third they need to be financed through, for example, distortionary taxes and finally they are often not cost-effective.…”

Section: Economic and Financial Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Internal and External Barriers to Energy Efficiency: Made-to-Measure Policy Interventions

Cattaneo

2018

SSRN Journal

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This paper has two objectives. First it provides a correlation between internal and external barriers to energy efficiency and consumer behaviour related to two domains. It evaluates behaviour related to energy curtailment, which represents routine, repetitive effort to decrease consumption on a day-today basis. It also considers behaviour related to investments, which are one time actions such as purchasing new energy efficiency technologies.. Second, it assesses the effectiveness of the different interventions and programs in addressing the two types of barriers (internal and external) with the aim of informing the policy debate. By assessing the value of a large number of interventions, this paper is one of the first that combines in a unified framework the main findings of different disciplines, from economics to psychology.

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“…The institutional features of the US appliance market combined with our rich micro-data allow us to study an exhaustive set of energy fiscal policies and highlight issues associated with microfrictions. Our empirical strategy extends our previous work on consumer rebates and energy labels (Houde and Aldy 2017;Houde 2017) and consists of a parsimonious structural demand model that captures heterogeneity in the responses to energy fiscal instruments. We focus on the US refrigerator market over 2008-2012, when local, state, and national policymakers implemented a rich array of fiscal instruments intended to promote energy-efficient purchases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Efficiency Consequences of Heterogeneous Behavioral Responses to Energy Fiscal Policies

Houde

Aldy

2017

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The behavioral responses to taxes and subsidies are often subject to various behavioral biases and transaction costs-what we define as "microfrictions." We develop a theoretical framework to show how these microfrictions-and their heterogeneity across the population and policy instrumentsaffect the design of Pigouvian policies. Standard Pigouvian pricing still holds with transaction costs, but requires adjustment with behavioral biases. We use transaction-level data from the US appliance market to estimate the heterogeneous behavioral responses to an array of energy fiscal policies and to quantify microfrictions. We then assess optimal fiscal policies and find that it is rarely optimal to couple a Pigouvian tax on energy with an investment subsidy in this context. We also find that energy labels-intended to increase the salience of energy information-can interact in perverse ways with both taxes and subsidies. Rodemeier, Andreas Löschel, Nicolai Kuminoff, and Massimo Filippini, for their comments and suggestions on previous drafts. We would also like to thank participants at NBER workshops on the energy policy trade-offs between economic efficiency and distributional equity, the AERE Summer Conference, and several seminar participants. This project benefited from support received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through the NBER Energy Policy Efficiency and Equity Tradeoffs project. Terms of use: Documents in

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Consumers' Response to State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Programs

Cited by 52 publications

References 29 publications

How consumers respond to product certification and the value of energy information

How consumers respond to product certification and the value of energy information

Internal and External Barriers to Energy Efficiency: Made-to-Measure Policy Interventions

The Efficiency Consequences of Heterogeneous Behavioral Responses to Energy Fiscal Policies

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