Rank and response: A field experiment on peer information and water use behavior

Bhanot, Syon

doi:10.1016/j.joep.2017.06.011

Cited by 52 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This result is not in line with most of the studies discussed in Section 2, of which most find rather large effects of social comparisons (with coupled norms and resource-saving tips) on residential water conservation (e.g., see Ferraro and Price, 2013). Our finding resembles the one of Bhanot (2017), who finds that a neutrally framed peer rank had no impact on water use over the full period of the experiment. Interestingly, one feature that distinguishes our study and Bhanot's from other studies is that our and Bhanot's social comparisons did not communicate an injunctive norm or water-saving tips.…”

Section: Average Treatment Effectscontrasting

confidence: 89%

“…However, Ayres et al (2013) report a much smaller ATE (1.2%) of a similar treatment on electricity and gas conservation among Opower clients in King County, WA, USA. Surprisingly, Bhanot (2017) finds that a social comparison referring to descriptive norms only (a "rank" treatment) had no effect, on average, on water use among households in Castro Walley, California, while a social comparison referring to coupled norms (a "competitive rank" treatment) in fact caused an increase in average water use.…”

Section: Brief Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…However, the results of these and other similar studies should be interpreted with caution as they do not isolate the effect of social norms (descriptive and/or injunctive) from the effect of resource-saving tips and, hence, they might have overstated the importance of the norms (Dolan and Metcalfe, April 2015). From the list of our selected studies, Ayres et al (2013), Dolan and Metcalfe (April 2015), and Bhanot (2017) partially address this problem of confounded effects by isolating the effect of peer comparisons from other effects. Dolan and Metcalfe (April 2015) find an average seven percent reduction in gas use among U.K. households who were provided only the social comparison treatment with coupled norms.…”

Section: Brief Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 93%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Social Comparisons in Real Time: A Field Experiment of Residential Electricity and Water Use

Kaaukauskas

Broberg

Jaraitė³

2017

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Economics (CERE) is an inter-disciplinary and inter-university research centre at the Umeå Campus: Umeå University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. The main objectives with the Centre are to tie together research groups at the different departments and universities; provide seminars and workshops within the field of environmental & resource economics and management; and constitute a platform for a creative and strong research environment within the field. AbstractA large body of literature shows that the provision of social comparisons can cause households to reduce residential energy and water use. In this paper, we carry out a field experiment that contributes to this literature in two important ways. First, we study a social comparison treatment that is continuous and communicated via pre-installed in-home displays, which are salient and updated in real time. Second, we estimate the effects of provision of social comparisons on two distinguished resources -electricity and water -in the same experimental setting. We find that, on average, our social comparison reduces daily residential energy consumption by 6.7 percent but has no effect on overall residential water use. The electricity savings are impersistent and occur in the evening hours, which only slightly overlap with peak hours. We argue that electricity conservation due to social comparisons is driven by short-run changes in households' electricity saving behavior.Our one-year field experiment started in March 2016 and took place in Umeå, a city in northern Sweden.The experiment has three key features that make it well-suited for estimating the causal effects of the social comparison treatment. First, we utilized a widely used contiguous block group approach to randomize the control and treatment groups, together comprising 525 households. This allows us to measure unbiased treatment effects on electricity and water use. Second, our experiment was carefully designed to isolate the effects of the social comparison treatment on households' electricity and water from any confounders. Many of the previous field experimental studies combined social comparisons with advice on how to conserve resources, and thus they were not able to disentangle the effect of peer comparisons from that of resource-saving tips. Third, in our study, we aim to control for the "new-gadget effect." For instance, newly installed in-home displays can be perceived as a treatment in itself, which may lead to biased treatment effects. In our experiment, the dwellings of the participating households were already equipped with the real-time displays prior to the experiment started. Thus, we avoid the new-gadget effect and are able to identify the actual causal effect of the social comparison treatment.Several interesting insights emerge from our study. We find that social comparisons provided through real-time displays affect electricity and water use differently. On average, our social comparison treatment reduces daily residential electricity consumption by 6.7 perce...

show abstract

Section: Average Treatment Effectscontrasting

confidence: 89%

Section: Brief Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Brief Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 93%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Social Comparisons in Real Time: A Field Experiment of Residential Electricity and Water Use

Kaaukauskas

Broberg

Jaraitė³

2017

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This can motivate performance (Loughry & Tosi, 2008;Mas & Moretti, 2009;Ranganathan & Benson, 2016;Tapscott & Ticoll, 2003;Waldinger, 2012), communication/sharing of knowledge (Burt, 2001;Gulati, Lavie, & Madhavan, 2011;Hansen, 1999; 4 Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996;Teece, 1992), learning (Argote, Ingram, Levine, & Moreland, 2000;Driver, 2002;Hackman & Wageman, 1995;Sitkin, Sutcliffe, & Schroeder, 1994), and the modification of behaviors through the peer effects of social information (Allcott, 2011;Beshears, Choi, Laibson, Madrian, & Milkman, 2015;Bhanot, 2015;Goldstein & Cialdini, 2007;Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008).  Transparency as process visibility-providing visual information focused on the process or implementation of a workflow or set of activities.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Bernstein¹

2017

ANNALS

176

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Observation is key to management scholarship and practice. Yet a holistic view of its role in management has been elusive, in part due to shifting terminology. The current popularity of the term "transparency" provides the occasion for a thorough review, which finds (a) a shift in the object of observation from organizational outcomes to the detailed individual activities within them; (b) a shift from people observing the technology to technology observing people; and (c) a split in the field, with managers viewing observation almost entirely from the observer's perspective, leaving the perspective of the observed to the realm of scholarly methodology courses and philosophical debates on privacy. I suggest how the literature on transparency and related literatures might be improved with research designed in light of these trends.KEYWORDS: transparency, privacy, performance, organizations, management theory ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I thank Julie Battilana, Ethan Burris, Tim Earle, Amy Edmondson, John Elder, Elizabeth Hansen, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Joshua Margolis, Tsedal Neeley, Nitin Nohria, Shefali Patil, Kathy Qu, Ryan Raffaelli, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Bradley Staats for feedback on prior versions of this work; Jim Detert, Sim Sitkin, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and developmental feedback; and the Harvard Business School for financial support.Please cite as: Bernstein, E. S. Making transparency transparent: The evolution of observation in management theory. Academy of Management Annals, 11(1): 217-266. 2We are increasingly observed and observing at work. Fifty years ago, a typical manager might have tracked production, revenue, and expenses against budget and periodically observed workers during in-person audits (e.g., Dalton, 1959). Today, advances in technology, from smart cameras to wearable tracking devices, make possible a kind of real-time "SuperVision" (Gilliom & Monahan, 2012) far beyond any level of observability envisioned 50 years ago or when Frederick Taylor (1911) originally promoted managerial oversight through scientific management.Public attention is captured by extreme examples of observation at work, like handheld computers (Amazon) or wearable bands (Tesco) tracking and optimizing employees' every move (Head, 2014;Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015;Rawlinson, 2013), embedded sensors in large fleets of company-owned trucks (e.g., UPS) recording hundreds of measurements to capture every action of the truck and its driver to unearth and enforce time-saving tactics (Goldstein, 2014;Levy, 2015), cameras at Las Vegas casino Harrah's tracking the smiles of card dealers and wait staff as a proxy for customer service quality (Peck, 2013), point-of-sale systems scraping every transaction for signs of employee fraud (Pierce, Snow, & McAfee, 2015), and RFID (radiofrequency identification)-enabled workspaces automatically capturing factory worker progress (Ranganathan, 2015), how long employees spend at their desks (Zillman, 2016), and even who does and does not use hand-soap and hand-sanitizer dispensers ...

show abstract

“…To name only a few recent economics papers, see Allcott (), Costa and Kahn (), Ferraro and Price (), Ferraro and Miranda (), Allcott and Rogers (), and Bhanot ().…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Every Drop Counts: A Water Conservation Experiment With Hotel Guests

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We implement a field experiment with hotel guests to measure the effects of nonprice interventions on water conservation and customer satisfaction. In hotels, guests have no direct pecuniary incentive to conserve water, as consumers do at home, where they pay their own water bills. Because hotels earn greater profits when they manage to convince guests to conserve, guests may be suspicious of a hotel's stated social goal of water conservation. By implementing behavioral interventions that address these challenges, we find that our nudges can induce guests to reduce their water consumption, even when no direct monetary incentive is provided. Using post‐stay customer surveys, we detected no adverse effects on customer satisfaction due to these nudges. (JEL D12, I31, Q41, Q50)

show abstract

Rank and response: A field experiment on peer information and water use behavior

Cited by 52 publications

References 24 publications

Social Comparisons in Real Time: A Field Experiment of Residential Electricity and Water Use

Social Comparisons in Real Time: A Field Experiment of Residential Electricity and Water Use

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Every Drop Counts: A Water Conservation Experiment With Hotel Guests

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About