What Causes Heterogeneous Responses to Social Comparison Messages for Water Conservation?

Daniel Brent, Corey Lott (), Michael Taylor (), Joseph Cook (), Kimberly Rollins and Shawn Stoddard ()
Additional contact information
Corey Lott: Laurits R Christensen Associates, Inc
Michael Taylor: University of Nevada Reno
Joseph Cook: Washington State University
Shawn Stoddard: Truckee Meadows Water Authority

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2020, vol. 77, issue 3, No 2, 503-537

Abstract: Abstract Social comparisons for water conservation are often implemented in conjunction with a broader set of drought management policies. We investigate the interaction of social comparisons with prior responses to voluntary appeals for water conservation using a large-scale field experiment in Reno, Nevada. We develop a new social comparison framed as performance toward a conservation goal in contrast to the traditional comparison made in gallons. Our new social comparison decouples the performance relative to the peer group from baseline water use, allowing us to investigate the role of the peer comparison independently from baseline water use. Using a traditional and our new social comparison, we investigate prior conservation and baseline water use as drivers of heterogeneous response to social comparisons. Baseline water drives treatment heterogeneity in the traditional social comparison, while prior conservation drives treatment heterogeneity the new social comparison. The results indicate that under-performance relative one’s peers is critical for generating water conservation. Simple targeting of both types of social comparisons can increase aggregate savings by 38% because our new social comparison generates conservation among a different set of households compared to the traditional social comparison.

Keywords: Behavioral interventions; Social norms; Field experiments; Water conservation; Water demand; D12; C93; H42; L95; Q21; Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-020-00506-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:enreec:v:77:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10640-020-00506-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-020-00506-0

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().