Energy Efficiency Gap: The Role of Behavioral Intervention

Energy renovation faces critical challenges due to upfront costs, market failures, behavioral bias and operational complexities, impeding its widespread adoption. We review the literature and report on impacts of behavioral sciences instruments. We also present a controlled laboratory experiment to evaluate the role of informational instruments in shaping individuals' preferences for energy efficiency. Our findings suggest that motivational feedback positively and significantly affects energy efficiency preference. We also find that people who value less fairness and less environmentally oriented are less likely to invest in energy-saving measures. Additionally, our study makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the usefulness of probit regression, and propensity score matching in analyzing complex data on energy-related behavior.