Speaker
Description
In France, around one in five households has a connected water meter and the aim is to double this number by 2030 (TACTIS 2023), while over 95% of the French population already has a connected electricity meter. Despite their limitations (privacy concerns, time and maintenance, ...), smart meters can provide consumers with better information on resource consumption. Many studies show that smart meters can significantly contribute to reducing energy and water consumption, especially when they show the average consumption of similar households, thereafter named "descriptive social norm".
Providing social norm information can decrease consumption, but also generate a non-desirable boomerang effect. A destructive effect occurs when a low consumer increases his consumption to get closer to others. A constructive effect occurs when conformist high consumers reduce their consumption to get closer to the others. The reconstructive effect corresponds to the situation where anti-conformist consumers consume less resource to deviate from the others.
Combining information on social norms with other tools has been shown to be efficient, but combining different social norms is still understudied. Literature on green compensatory effects and moral licensing shows that when individuals take a positive environmental action, they easily sacrifice another action, but this remains to be studied in combination with the impact of social normal information.
Our study aims to provide new insights into the complementarity and substitution effects of combining social norms, i.e. providing information on peers' consumption of several resources. Here, we focus on the effects on water and electricity consumption, using both a theoretical model and an online experimental survey on French energy and water consumers. To do so, each respondent faces 8 hypothetical situations in which they have to declare their level of consumption of water and energy, in different information settings regarding the consumption of similar households and different resource prices scenarios.
While water smart meters are being massively developed in France, our results will provide insights to policy makers and resources distributors on how to inform consumers in a context of energy and water scarcity. They will shed light on how to target individuals in order to benefit from the constructive or reconstructive effects of social norms. Pilot data will be available by the time of the conference.
| Keywords | field experiment, water, social norm |
|---|---|
| Status of your work | Experimental Design |
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
