Social Norms and Energy Conservation Beyond the US

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) show that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective climate policy intervention in the US. Our paper demonstrates the context-dependency of this result. In most industrialized countries, average electricity consumption and carbon intensity are well below US levels. Consequently, HER interventions can only become cost-effective if treatment effect sizes are substantially higher. For Germany, we provide evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial that effect sizes are in fact considerably lower than in the US. We conclude by illustrating that targeting highly responsive subgroups is crucial to reach cost-effectiveness and by identifying the few countries in which HER are promising policy instruments.