IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/zewdip/333899.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do energy-saving nudges deliver during high-price periods? Field experimental evidence from the European energy crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Tinnefeld, Vicky
  • Kesternich, Martin
  • Werthschulte, Madeline

Abstract

Urged by the European Energy Crisis and the threatening consequences of severe natural gas shortages, energy providers launched gas-saving initiatives incorporating financial incentives to reduce residential natural gas consumption. In collaboration with one of Germany's largest energy providers, we conducted a natural field experiment (N = 2,598) to evaluate the effectiveness of a behaviorally-guided co-design of such a gas-saving initiative by implementing two established behavioral instruments - reminders of gas saving intentions and descriptive norm feedback. Our findings show limited effectiveness of the behavioural instruments during the high-price period. The feedback risks a "boomerang effect" among households with above-average initial savings, who reduce their conservation efforts in response. The reminder does not significantly enhance savings in our main specifications, yet, realizes 1 percentage point savings in alternate models refining for outliers. Potential mechanisms include a significant intention-action gap and misperceived effectiveness of energy-saving actions, which are not alleviated by the reminder.

Suggested Citation

  • Tinnefeld, Vicky & Kesternich, Martin & Werthschulte, Madeline, 2025. "Do energy-saving nudges deliver during high-price periods? Field experimental evidence from the European energy crisis," ZEW Discussion Papers 25-060, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:333899
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/333899/1/1945743212.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • D04 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Policy: Formulation; Implementation; Evaluation
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • Q41 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Demand and Supply; Prices

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:333899. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zemande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.