What causes heterogeneous responses to social comparison messages for water conservation?

Social comparisons for water conservation are often implemented in conjunction with a broader set of drought management policies. We investigate the interaction of social comparisons with prior responses to voluntary appeals for water conservation using a large-scale field experiment in Reno, Nevada. We develop a new social comparison framed as performance toward a conservation goal in contrast to the traditional comparison made in gallons. Our new social comparison decouples the performance relative to the peer group from baseline water use, allowing us to investigate the role of the peer comparison independently from baseline water use. Using a traditional and our new social comparison, we investigate prior conservation and baseline water use as drivers of heterogeneous response to social comparisons. Baseline water drives treatment heterogeneity in the traditional social comparison, while prior conservation drives treatment heterogeneity the new social comparison. The results indicate that under-performance relative one’s peers is critical for generating water conservation. Simple targeting of both types of social comparisons can increase aggregate savings by 38% because our new social comparison generates conservation among a different set of households compared to the traditional social comparison.

This is the accepted manuscript version of an article accepted for publication in Environmental and Resource Economics. Use of this accepted manuscript is subject to SpringerNature's accepted manuscript terms of use: https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/policies/accepted-manuscript-terms

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Work Title What causes heterogeneous responses to social comparison messages for water conservation?
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Open Access
Creators
  1. Daniel A. Brent
  2. Corey Lott
  3. Michael Taylor
  4. Joseph Cook
  5. Kimberly Rollins
  6. Shawn Stoddard
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Environmental and Resource Economics
Publication Date September 4, 2020
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00506-0
Deposited November 18, 2021

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  • Created
  • Added HetNorms.pdf
  • Added Creator Daniel A. Brent
  • Added Creator Corey Lott
  • Added Creator Michael Taylor
  • Added Creator Joseph Cook
  • Added Creator Kimberly Rollins
  • Added Creator Shawn Stoddard
  • Published
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