Nudging Energy Efficiency Audits : Evidence from A Field Experiment

This paper uses a randomized field experiment to test how information provision leveraging social norms, salience, and a personal touch can serve as a nudge to influence the uptake of residential energy audits. Our results show that a low-cost carefully-crafted note-card can increase the probability of a household to follow through with an already scheduled audit by 1.1 percentage points on a given day. This implies a boost of the audit uptake rate for our sample by 20 percentage points. The effect is very similar across individuals with different political views, but households in rural areas display a substantially greater effect than those in urban areas. Our findings have important managerial and policy implications, as they suggest a cost-effective nudge for increasing energy audit uptake and voluntary energy efficiency adoption