Conference Agenda

Demand Response (DR) has been traditionally a cost-effective strategy for peak shaving, aimed at reducing high production costs and inefficient infrastructure investments required to manage peak loads. However, in the climate crisis era, DR is increasingly recognized as a key strategy for integrating renewable energy by mitigating its intermittency and variability. Ensuring sta- ble renewable integration requires aligning demand with irregular supply, not only by reducing consumption during peak hours but also by increasing electricity usage during periods of surplus generation. To examine how consumers respond to both electricity usage reduction and increase requests under an incentive-based DR strategy, our study conducts a field experiment with 272 apartment residents in Jeonju, South Korea, adopting the experimental design of Andersen et al. (2019) and incorporating pre- and post-experiment surveys. Findings confirm that participants adjusted their electricity consumption in the requested direction. Notably, usage-increasing DR shifted consumption from adjacent time slots, while usage-reducing DR deferred usage to adjacent time slots, maintaining overall daily electricity consumption. DR effectiveness varied by time slot and appliance type, with usage-reducing DR most effective during high-load periods and usage- increasing DR peaking between 1–7 p.m., aligning with solar generation hours. This suggests that bidirectional DR can serve as a valuable tool for demand-side management. Among appliances, LED lighting, coffee makers, and dishwashers contributed significantly to both usage-increasing and usage-decreasing DR, while a greater variety of appliances contributed to usage-increasing DR than to usage-reducing DR.

Over the past two decades, the power of randomization through carefully designed policy experiments has gained traction in the social sciences, including environmental and energy economics. Despite their growing popularity among researchers, most government policies are still designed and implemented without consulting evidence from prior experimentation, often actively resisting the idea of controlled trials. ``Experiment aversion', that is, people's moral objection to policy experimentation, has been proposed as an explanation. Here we demonstrate -- in the context of energy efficiency assistance program -- people's capacity for trading off possible moral objections against the benefits of policy experimentation, both as members of the public and as policy-makers and experts. In our main study, members of the general public made a real and consequential decision on how 200 low-income households would be treated in an ongoing field trial of an assistance program. Only 38 percent of participants had rated experimentation as morally appropriate in this context in a corresponding vignette study. Yet, 72 percent of participants chose the policy experiment in the real decision. Replicating the design with policy-makers and experts, 67 percent chose the policy experiment. We hypothesize that the phenomenon of ``experiment aversion' reflects the nature of vignette designs and its focus on moral objections rather than genuine preferences about policy experimentation and find supporting evidence.

We analyze the impact of price and non-price interventions on households’ water conservation behavior through a field experiment conducted in Seosan, an urban-rural complex city in South Korea, which was severely affected by droughts in 2015-2017. This study measures the price intervention effect by comparing households’ water consumption before and after an increase in actual water rates and finds that the price intervention is shown to be effective but transitory, disappearing after one month. Through a field experiment, non-price interventions were also implemented with four information nudges: bringing water usage into households’ attention; providing social norms or standards; informing social effects of water shortage; and providing information on the water-electricity nexus. Most non-price interventions were found to be ineffective in reducing households’ water consumption. The only effective information nudge was providing information comparing a household’s water consumption to its peers, but this effect differs from one observed in similar experiments on electricity consumption. Households that consumed less water than their peers conserved more water in the following month when they were told that their water consumption was lower than their neighbors in the same conditions (i.e., peers). In addition, altruism or civic consciousness-induced water conservation behavior was found in households already using lower-than-average water levels

We investigate why farmers actively avoid climate change information and how it affects the effectiveness of information campaigns. We administered a preregistered experiment on a sample of European farmers and foresters from Italy, Belgium, Lithuania, and Finland. We collected two samples: one where respondents could skip climate change information and another composed of a control group and a treatment group where respondents are shown climate change information. Around 34% of farmers and forest owners actively avoid the information in the first sample. Distrust in scientists and low pro-environmental attitudes correlate positively with information avoidance. The information nudge increases respondents' willingness to implement environmentally sustainable practices in the second sample. Using machine learning, we find that those with a similar profile to the information seekers of the first sample drive the effect of the nudge. Our results suggest that the null effects of information nudges found in the literature might be explained by information avoidance, creating hidden heterogeneity.

Legal norms can have a direct effect on individual behavior through their legal enforcement. However, according to the ‘expressive function of law,’ they can also have indirect effects on individual behavior by shaping related social norms. Since evidence for this expressive function is scarce, we consider a new law on corporate due diligence for the protection of human rights and the environment (i.e. the German Supply Chain Act) and empirically examine its indirect effects on individual sustainable purchasing behavior, as indicated by the willingness to pay (WTP) for sustainable socks, where sustainability is ensured by the certification with a label of the Fair Wear Foundation. The empirical analysis is based on data from a pre-registered and incentivized experiment implemented in a representative survey of 1,017 citizens in Germany. Before making socks purchasing decisions and the elicitation of related personal injunctive and perceived social norms, the respondents were randomly assigned to either a control group or a treatment group that received information about the German Supply Chain Act. We examine average treatment effects and, based on a causal mediation analysis, the mediating role of related personal injunctive and perceived social norms on individual sustainable purchasing behavior. A manipulation check shows that the treatment information has a significantly positive effect on individual knowledge about the objectives of the German Supply Chain Act. However, the treatment information has no significant effect on the WTP for sustainable socks with the Fair Wear Foundation label or on related norms. Although our mediation analysis reveals that personal injunctive and perceived social norms are significantly positively correlated with this WTP, our experimental analysis does not provide any evidence for the expressive function of law in the case of the German Supply Chain Act and individual sustainable purchasing behavior.

Using information feedback to influence electricity consumption behavior is a key approach under the "nudge" theory to promote energy conservation, reduce emissions, and mitigate climate change. While extensive research has demonstrated the effectiveness of information interventions in encouraging energy-saving behaviors, most studies have focused on private settings, such as households, where individuals bear the cost of electricity. In contrast, public settings—where users do not directly pay for electricity—remain underexplored. It is thus unclear which type of information intervention is most effective in promoting energy conservation in public settings and how the same intervention might yield different behavioral responses in public versus private contexts.

This study leverages the unique dormitory electricity consumption structure at Sichuan University to design a randomized field experiment and employs a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effects of three types of information interventions—ranking feedback, social norm feedback, and combined feedback—on students’ electricity usage in both public and private settings. The findings reveal significant contextual differences in the effectiveness of these interventions. In public settings, providing anticipated electricity consumption feedback encourages individuals to conserve energy, particularly when they recognize discrepancies between their behavior and social expectations. In private settings, combined feedback incorporating both ranking and anticipated consumption proves most effective in reducing electricity use. Additionally, the effectiveness of each intervention varies based on individuals’ environmental beliefs, highlighting the importance of personalized feedback in energy conservation strategies.

Furthermore, this study estimates the economic, social, and environmental benefits of effective information interventions. In the optimal scenario, student dormitories at Sichuan University's Wangjiang Campus could save approximately 285,000 kWh of electricity annually, reducing electricity costs by 1.556 million CNY and cutting carbon emissions by 408.6 tons of CO₂—equivalent to the annual carbon absorption of approximately 18,572 mature trees (a small to medium-sized forest). Overall, this research provides critical insights for designing targeted energy-saving interventions across different contexts, encouraging broader adoption of information feedback strategies to reduce energy waste, promote sustainable behaviors, and protect the environment.