Information acquisition and residential electricity consumption: Evidence from a field experiment

摘要

This article uses hourly data on household usage of an in-home display (IHD) in a randomized field experiment to investigate how acquiring information from IHDs affects electricity usage of households. Providing IHDs, which enables households to see a graph of their half-hourly electricity consumption in real time, is a promising policy intervention that corrects for biases associated with inattention and limited information-processing capacity by promoting salience and learning. The immediate effect of providing an IHD is heightened household attention to information on consumption, and the repetition of attention is expected to improve households' capacity to process information.