IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2018 - 48

research is needed into the conditions under which crowding out
intrinsic motivation is more or less likely to occur and then if and
how incentives can be designed to at least avoid crowding out
intrinsic motivation for sustainable energy behaviors.

Temporary Incentives to Change Energy Habits
like other interventions, monetary incentives may lead to
durable fossil-energy savings if they produce a change in
behavior and the new behavior becomes habitual. habits are
behaviors that people engage in automatically under specific
conditions, without considering their motivation or the costs
and benefits of the behavior. For example, in one study, people who were randomly assigned to pay extra for energy consumption during peak hours significantly reduced their peak
energy consumption as compared to a control group. in this
case, a monetary incentive indeed changed energy behavior.
The monetary incentive may have been strong enough to compensate for the effort needed to switch energy use to off-peak
hours, at least for a while. alternatively, the monetary incentive may have focused people on their intrinsic motivation to
reduce fossil-energy use. The study showed that the group that
received the monetary incentive also used less energy than the
control group during off-peak times, when there was no incentive, and they continued using less energy after the incentive
was removed. Possibly, the monetary incentive increased attention to energy consumption, reinforcing people's behavioral
motivation to consume energy responsibly, and facilitated the
formation of a sustained habit to reduce consumption. however, more research is needed on the conditions under which
monetary incentives may lead to the establishment of new habits for sustainable energy behaviors.
in sum, engineers and economists who are designing energy
markets and efficiency schemes should be aware that there are
downsides to using monetary incentives but there are also indications that at least some of these may be overcome. monetary
incentives can sometimes remind people of or strengthen their
intrinsic motivation to reduce household fossil-energy use, perhaps because regulations using monetary incentives may be
perceived as a sign of the seriousness of the targeted problem.
Furthermore, a temporary monetary incentive can be a means
to break unsustainable energy habits and instill new, more sustainable habits. however, when developing cost-effective interventions to reduce household fossil-energy use, it may often be
more cost-effective to use other strategies, for example relying
on social influence.

Summary
We still need a better understanding of which incentives and
other strategies influence which types of energy behavior, how,
and under which circumstances. To achieve this, care needs to
be taken to control for possible confounding factors that might
influence behavioral and energy outcomes, which is most effectively done by randomly assigning participants to different treatment groups and a control group. When testing the effectiveness
of monetary incentives and other strategies, it is important to
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focus on those behaviors that reduce emissions the most. a disproportionate number of studies thus far have tested the influence of interventions on curtailment behaviors, while efficiency
behaviors often lead to larger energy and emissions savings. To
fully assess the energy savings following an intervention, it is
important to take possible indirect effects (i.e., spillover effects)
on other energy behaviors into account that are not directly
targeted by the intervention. Finally, to improve the effectiveness of interventions, we need to understand why they may be
effective, which can be done using surveys and other methods
to measure these underlying processes. This will help policy
makers develop cost-effective interventions to reduce emissions
by reducing household fossil-energy use, without automatically
relying on costly and ineffective monetary incentives.

Acknowledgement
Wandi bruine de bruin gratefully acknowledges support
from the U.K. economic and Social research council (eS/
l011891/1) and the climate and energy Decision making
(ceDm) center through a cooperative agreement with the
national Science Foundation (SeS-0949710) and the carnegie mellon Department of engineering and Public Policy.

For Further Reading
W. bruine de bruin and T. Krishnamurti, "Developing interventions about residential electricity use: Three lessons
learned," in Delivering Energy Policy in the UK and the US:
A Reader, r. J. heffron and g. F. m. little, eds. edinburgh,
U.K.: Univ. edinburgh Press, 2016, pp. 442-447.
m. a. Delmas, m. Fischlein, and o. i. asensio, "information strategies and energy conservation behavior: a metaanalysis of experimental studies from 1975 to 2012," Energy
Policy, vol. 61, pp. 729-739, 2013.
K. gillingham, m. J. Kotchen, D. S. rapson, and g. Wagner, "energy policy: The rebound effect is overplayed," Nature, vol. 493, no. 7433, pp. 475-476, 2013.
m. handgraaf, a. griffioen, J. W. bolderdijk, and J.
Thøgersen, "economic psychology and pro-environmental
behavior," in Economic Psychology, r. ranyard, ed. chichester, UK: Wiley blackwell, 2017, pp. 435-450.
b. Karlin, J. F. Zinger, and r. Ford, "The effects of feedback on energy conservation: a meta-analysis," Psychol.
Bull., vol. 141, no. 6, pp. 1205-1227, 2015.
P. c. Stern, i. Wittenberg, K. S. Wolske, and i. Kastner, "household production of photovoltaic energy: issues in economic behavior," in Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic
Behavior. cambridge, U.K.: cambridge Univ. Press, 2017.

Biographies
Ellen van der Werff is with the University of groningen,
The netherlands.
John Thøgersen is with aarhus University, Denmark.
Wändi Bruine de Bruin is with leeds University business School, United Kingdom.
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