Conference Agenda

Energy markets have so far struggled to encourage flexible household electricity use, partly due to limited consumer price salience. This study tests whether targeted price information affects consumption timing using a randomized controlled trial in Finland with 1,500 dynamic pricing customers. The treatment group received daily messages highlighting the next day’s demand response potential with high- and low-price hours and full price listings for six months. Results show that price messages significantly shifted consumption for spot-price households, especially on days with high intra-day price variability, while hybrid-price households showed no response. Overall, electricity remains largely price-inelastic, highlighting the need for smart, automated load control and dynamic pricing combined with consumer information for effective demand response.

A third of the world’s population still relies on traditional cookstoves and polluting

fuels, despite the many benefits of cleaner cooking technologies. The adoption of modern stoves is not the only barrier to this transition, since households with access to cleaner technologies often continue using traditional stoves. One reason for this ‘stove stacking’ is that modern cooking technologies are often considered incompatible with established and customary household cooking practices. These practices are not only ‘normative’ but often ‘habitual’, making them particularly difficult to change. This paper asks whether behavioral insights can help to better align household cooking practices with the capabilities of modern stoves, using a group session implemented as a randomized control trial in peri-urban Rwanda. Based on a behavioral model of the clean cooking transition, the intervention seeks to instill a new cooking habit amongst participants (pre-soaking beans before cooking them) by targeting participant attitudes, norms and perceived behavioral control, as well as using contextual cues to encourage repetition of the behavior over time. Results point to the successful formation of a new energy-efficient cooking habit that lowered cook times on traditional stoves on days in which beans are cooked. The intervention also had a positive effect on attitudes about the

suitability of modern stoves for cooking beans, and increased participants’ aspirations and expectations to purchase these devices.

This paper examines how uncertainty about future carbon prices shapes household beliefs and early investment behavior. In a large-scale experiment with German homeowners, participants receive expert forecasts for the 2030 carbon price that share the same mean (85 euros/t) but differ in precision: a narrow range (low uncertainty), a wide range (high uncertainty), or no forecast (control). This isolates the effect of forecast variance while holding expected prices constant.

Wider forecast ranges produce more dispersed beliefs and heighten the salience of political and policy risk. Higher uncertainty also increases the willingness to pay for a professional energy audit by roughly 25 euros - a persistent shift consistent with greater perceived risk rather than higher expected returns.

The evidence points to precautionary learning: when facing complex and partly irreversible decisions, households respond to uncertainty by acquiring information rather than acting immediately. Finally, we provide early evidence on the dynamic relationship between information acquisition and physical investment under uncertainty, showing that a greater willingness to learn does not necessarily translate into faster carbon abatement actions by households.

Postharvest crop residue burning (CRB) remains a major source of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and public health damage across Asia, driven by economic constraints, weak enforcement, and collective action failures. This paper provides causal evidence on how alternative incentive designs influence farmers’ burning behavior, emphasizing the role of behavioral framing rather than incentive magnitude alone. We report results from a randomized field experiment with 299 rice farmers in three provinces of Thailand, comparing three incentive schemes conditional on verifiable non-burning behavior: a guaranteed individual cash payment, a lottery-based payment with an equivalent expected value, and an anonymous group-based compensation scheme. Compliance is measured using high-resolution satellite imagery combined with ground-truth field verification. We find that individually targeted incentives significantly reduce CRB, with strong heterogeneity across designs. Guaranteed payments reduce burning by approximately 7 percentage points, while lottery-based incentives reduce burning by 12–13 percentage points, despite having similar expected payouts. Regression estimates with village fixed effects show that lottery incentives reduce the probability of burning by nearly 60 percent relative to the control group. In contrast, anonymous group-based incentives have no detectable effect on burning behavior. These results are consistent with behavioral theories of nonlinear probability weighting and salience, suggesting that probabilistic rewards can improve behavioral responses without increasing fiscal costs. The effectiveness of lottery incentives is reinforced by their alignment with locally familiar and trusted institutions. This study makes a novel contribution as one of the first experimental evaluations of incentive-based policies to reduce crop residue burning in Southeast Asia. The findings offer practical guidance for designing cost-effective, scalable environmental policies that can draw on behavioral mechanisms to address persistent agricultural externalities.

We examine whether giving individuals an active choice to participate in an energy conservation program strengthens engagement. We hypothesize that voluntary adoption of energy-saving goals may lead to stronger outcomes than assigned goals, partly because making an active choice increases psychological ownership and attention. To test this, we ran a field experiment with 1,642 Taiwanese households, randomly assigned to a control group, an Assigned Goal treatment, or an Adopted Goal treatment where participants could opt in. The experiment had two phases: Phase 1 included only incentivized energy-saving goals; Phase 2 added energy-saving tips and task-based incentives. Goals alone did not significantly reduce electricity use. Once task-based incentives were added, significant savings emerged—but only for those who voluntarily adopted the goal. They were also more likely to complete the tasks, indicating that voluntary commitment and attention supported sustained engagement. The findings highlight the value of active choice in improving the cost-effectiveness of conservation programs.

Carbon farming represents a major lever for promoting long-term climate mitigation and livelihood benefits in the Global South, yet smallholder uptake remains limited. Behavioral constraints—particularly present bias and risk aversion—are frequently identified as barriers, but their relative importance for land-use decisions is yet unclear. We address this gap using a framed field experiment with 393 smallholder cashew farmers in Ghana. Participants repeatedly allocate trees between cashew and timber on a virtual 25-tree plot under hypothetical carbon payment schemes that vary payment timing (immediate vs. delayed) and payment certainty (guaranteed vs. probabilistic) in a 2×2 factorial design, holding expected payment values constant. Preliminary results show that payment timing affects early land-use choices: farmers facing immediate payments allocate on average 0.4–0.5 more timber trees in early rounds relative to delayed-payment schemes (p $<$ 0.10). These timing effects attenuate over subsequent rounds. Differences by payment certainty are smaller on average, but certain payments increase timber allocation by approximately 0.6–0.8 trees in selected mid rounds (p $<$ 0.05). Across all treatments, timber allocation rises steadily over rounds, consistent with dynamic adjustment and learning. Overall, the results suggest that present-oriented preferences pose a more salient constraint than risk considerations in shaping initial adoption decisions, with implications for the design of carbon payment mechanisms targeting smallholders.

Disclaimer: Because data collection concluded in December 2025, all findings should be interpreted as preliminary. Final robustness checks, heterogeneity analyses, and alternative specifications are ongoing.

Dynamic pricing of electricity is considered as an important demand response tool to improve economic efficiency and provide choice to consumers. It also sends price signals for energy conservation and promotion of variable renewable generation sources. While the provision of dynamic electricity pricing (DEP) option for retail electricity consumers is becoming more widespread, the actual outcomes depend on multiple factors that are both internal and external to the individual households. In this study, we explore the heterogeneities in adoption preferences of DEP by residential consumers based on original survey data from 1225 Irish households. Our empirical analysis is in two parts: first, we identify latent behavioural factors underlying stated preference to switch from existing residential tariff plan to DEP using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling approach. Next, we run an ordinal logit model to test the role and extent of association between stated preferences to switch from existing tariff plan to DEP and a range of explanatory factors, while controlling for the physical and socio-demographic profiles. Our findings suggest that switching preference for (DEP) options in Irish residential electricity consumers remains low and is more associated with intrinsic behavioural and situational factors moderated by annual income and age profiles of households than the existing tariff structure of households or the type of heating fuel used. These results provide a first estimation of the potential of DEP to change electricity use behaviour in a country where increasing electrification is a crucial part of the overall decarbonisation strategy and should provide insights to policymakers.