The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation

Abstract

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency “action and backsliding,” but these cycles attenuate over time. Second, if reports are discontinued after two years, effects are relatively persistent, decaying at 10–20 percent per year. Third, consumers are slow to habituate: they continue to respond to repeated treatment even after two years. We show that the previous conservative assumptions about post-intervention persistence had dramatically understated cost effectiveness and illustrate how empirical estimates can optimize program design.(JEL D12, D83, L94, Q41)

Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments

“…27 However, a rich research tradition also raises doubts about the ability of mass messages to leave more than a fleeting impression on the public (e.g., Campbell et al 1960;Klapper 1960), even when sympathetic subjects are directly exposed to persuasive content (e.g., Hovland et al 1949). Consistent with this ''minimal effects'' perspective, observational studies and field experiments suggest that individuals often forget televised messages within a matter of days or even hours (e.g., Gerber et al 2011a;Hill et al 2012;Sears and Kosterman 1994); lab studies of negative advertising (e.g., Mutz and Reeves 2005) and issue framing (e.g., Chong and Druckman 2010) often find that the effects of experimental stimuli decay rapidly; and impersonal behavioral interventions often exhibit rapid decay or fail altogether (e.g., Allcott and Rogers 2012;Galiani et al 2012).…”

Sensitivity of price elasticity of demand to aggregation, unobserved heterogeneity, price trends, and price endogeneity: Evidence from U.S. Data

“…In recent years, several papers (Auffhammer et al 2014;Ito, 2014;Allcott, 2011;and Allcott and Rogers, 2014) have deployed panel datasets provided by utilities, with electricity usage readings at a high level of granularity, but virtually no information about the household or the home, despite the importance of behavioral aspects and of the structural characteristics of the dwelling in influencing consumption patterns. 6 …”

Clean up your own mess: An experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency

“…More recent studies focus on the performance of classic policy instruments in terms of environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency (e.g., Ambec et al 2014). Relatedly, field experiments have been employed to develop and test policy instruments when consumers respond to social information (Allcott and Rogers, 2014) or are biased (Allcott and Taubinsky, 2015). Building on this literature that takes human behavior into account when designing environmental policies, we examine how the acceptance and effectiveness of traditional market-based policy instruments may be affected by behavioral factors (namely moral concerns) that have so far been neglected in the literature.…”