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Social Comparison and Energy Conservation: Mechanism, Heterogeneity and Timing

This paper conducted a survey-based experiment to detect how energy conservation based on social comparison occurs by applying billing and payment data. By comparing consumption behavior before and after intervention, we find that households will reduce their daily energy consumption by 4.4\% on average. Moreover, we find that only households that were originally inattentive to energy consumption will significantly change their consumption behavior, which indicates that conservation behavior based on social comparison is triggered by more attention to the fact of energy consumption instead of guilt or the moral cost of energy usage. Therefore, energy conservation may push energy demand to more optimal level, which will improve the level of social welfare. Further results based on hourly frequency data show that this conservation behavior mainly occurs in the early morning, which is the non-peak time with lower marginal price. The reasons for this result might be both the lower marginal utility during sleeping time and the existence of behavioral change cost. Our results suggest that inattention to energy consumption may be the most critical source of over consumption. The timing result also indicates that there might be a dislocation of current time-of-use (TOU) prices and that policy formulation regarding energy conservation should well consider the co-effect on the whole energy system.