The Role of Sales Agents in Information Disclosure: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Hunt Allcott () and Richard L. Sweeney ()
Additional contact information
Hunt Allcott: Department of Economics, New York University, New York, New York 10012
Richard L. Sweeney: Economics Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467

Management Science, 2017, vol. 63, issue 1, 21-39

Abstract: With a large nationwide retailer, we run a natural field experiment to measure the effects of energy use information disclosure, customer rebates, and sales agent incentives on demand for energy-efficient durable goods. Although a combination of large rebates plus sales incentives substantially increases market share, information and sales incentives alone each have zero statistical effect and explain at most a small fraction of the low baseline market share. Sales agents strategically comply only partially with the experiment, targeting information to more interested consumers but not discussing energy efficiency with the disinterested majority. These results suggest that seller-provided information is not a major barrier to energy-efficiency investments at current prices in this context.

Keywords: energy efficiency; energy-using durables; information disclosure; randomized field experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2327 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:63:y:2017:i:1:p:21-39

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().