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The Power to Conserve: A Field Experiment on Electricity Use in Qatar

Omar Al-Ubaydli, Alecia Cassidy, Anomitro Chatterjee, Ahmed Khalifa and Michael Price

No 31931, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: High resource users often have the strongest response to behavioral interventions promoting conservation. Yet, litlle is known about how to motivate them. We implement a field experiment in Qatar, where residential customers have some of the highest energy use per capita in the world. Our dataset consists of 207,325 monthly electricity meter readings from a panel of 6,096 customers. We employ two normative treatments priming identity - a religious message quoting the Qur’an, and a national message reminding households that Qatar prioritizes energy conservation. The treatments reduce electricity use by 3.8% and both messages are equally effective. Using machine learning methods on supplemental survey data, we elucidate how agency, motivation, and responsibility activate conservation responses to our identity primes.

JEL-codes: C93 D90 Q4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ene and nep-exp
Note: EEE PE
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