Are consumers attentive to local energy costs? Evidence from the appliance market

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Houde, Sebastien; Myers, Erica
• 署名单位: Grenoble Ecole Management; University of Calgary
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104480
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Inattention; shrouded attributes; Energy efficiency gap; Carbon pricing; Electricity rate design

摘要

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We cannot reject that consumers respond to lifetime energy costs in the same way they respond to purchase prices under a wide range of assumptions. These findings run counter to the popular wisdom, which motivates energy standards, that energy costs are systematically undervalued due to various behavioral phenomena. They imply that electricity pricing that deviates from social marginal costs, due to failure to incorporate pollution externalities or due to other features in rate design, can have substantial distortionary effects on demand. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.