Using loss aversion to incentivize energy efficiency in a principal-agent context - Evidence from a field experiment

摘要

Promoting energy-efficient behavior of agents in a principal-agent context simultaneously decreases costs for firms and mitigates CO2 emissions. Along this line, we analyze the effect of incentive framing on energy-efficient driving behavior. Our results contribute to the understanding of the drawbacks of loss framing. In a situation with persistent labor market relations, an extremely low bonus, and heterogeneous prior performance, the introduction of a bonus framed as a gain outperforms that of a bonus framed as a loss. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.