Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know: Informedness and External Validity in Information Programs

Abstract

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.

Can social information programs be more effective? The role of environmental identity for energy conservation

“…4 We only weakly echo in our setting the seminal results from Costa and Kahn (2013), which analyze heterogeneity with respect to political preference and revealed preference measures of environmental ideology. 5 We also confirm the presence of boomerang effects: social information results in higher energy use among customers with low baseline consumption (Byrne et al, 2018;Bhanot, 2017), in spite of the other program features aimed at preventing such boomerang effects (Schultz et al, 2007).…”

“…To explore potential sources of heterogeneous impacts of these messages, we combine administrative data on consumption with survey data on a sub-sample of 4835 customers. This is similar to Byrne et al (2018), which investigates the heterogeneous response to an energy conservation program from survey data on a sub-sample of almost 1200 program recipients and control households.…”

Advances in Evaluating Energy Efficiency Policies and Programs

“…Ayres et al (2012) also find no evidence of the boomerang effect for low baseline consumption customers. Byrne et al (2014), in contrast, study the effects of information provision in Australia using an RCT and find evidence of the boomerang effect for consumers that underestimated their baseline energy consumption. They observe that underestimating households decrease consumption and vice versa.…”

The Effect of Information and Subsidy Measures on Adoption of Solar Lanterns: An Application of the BDM Bidding Mechanism in Rural Ethiopia

“…Other studies show that individuals who are less responsive to monetary incentives (i.e., wealthier households and high users of the resource) exhibit significant changes in behavior when they are targeted by information campaigns including a combination of technical information, moral suasion and social comparisons (Jaime and Carlsson, 2018;Ferraro and Miranda, 2013). There is also evidence of rebound effects in interventions of this sort, as pointed out by Byrne et al (2014), where consumers underestimated their baseline energy consumption. In contrast, there is little evidence of heterogeneous responses to purely technical information or moral suasion (Ferraro and Miranda, 2013).…”