Moral utility or Moral Tax? Experimental Study of Electricity Conservation by Social Comparison

Kenta Tanaka, Yukihide Kurakawa, Takunori Ishihara, Ken-Ichi Akao and Takanori Ida

Discussion papers from Graduate School of Economics , Kyoto University

Abstract: Social comparison, such as information on other consumer’s energy usage, can achieve equal or higher performance, compared with economic incentives. However, previous studies do not adequately reveal the informational content for social comparison that can encourage electricity conservation. This study investigates the effects of different social comparisons via a laboratory experiment. We set up a hypothetical situation of electricity use in a laboratory. Although many previous studies employing laboratory experiments invite residents as the subject of the experiments, the subject’s economic situation does not reflect the initial setting of the laboratory experiments. In our experiment, we set up the initial set of experiments based on each subject’s actual electricity usage in daily life. Therefore, our experiments approximate real behavior better than previous studies. The results show that any information about other consumers’ electricity usage increases the electricity conservation behavior of almost all the subjects. Thus, our results show that voluntary conservation by the social comparison scheme can improve the total welfare of the society. However, the results also demonstrate the importance of considering the psychological effect of social comparison.

Keywords: Electricity Conservation; Behavioral Economics; Artifactual Field Experiment; Social Comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dp/papers/e-19-011.pdf (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:kue:epaper:e-19-011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Graduate School of Economics , Kyoto University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Graduate School of Economics Project Center ().