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Working papers
Working papers
Guided Goal-setting: How Tailored Menus Shape Energy Conservation
Can gamification motivate resource conservation? We explore this question by encouraging households to download an app that uses smart meter data to set weekly water usage goals and provide daily feedback on water consumption. The intervention reduced average daily water use by 8.8%. We found no bunching around goals but observed distributional shifts in daily water usage with systemic goal overshooting. These results, combined with complementary survey data, illustrate how household optimization frictions influence behavior in goal-based programs. At scale, the intervention is cost-effective, complementing and potentially lessening the need for costly water capacity investments like desalination plants.
Link to paper
Guided Goal-setting: How Tailored Menus Shape Energy Conservation
Can gamification motivate resource conservation? We explore this question by encouraging households to download an app that uses smart meter data to set weekly water usage goals and provide daily feedback on water consumption. The intervention reduced average daily water use by 8.8%. We found no bunching around goals but observed distributional shifts in daily water usage with systemic goal overshooting. These results, combined with complementary survey data, illustrate how household optimization frictions influence behavior in goal-based programs. At scale, the intervention is cost-effective, complementing and potentially lessening the need for costly water capacity investments like desalination plants.
Link to paper
Work in progress
Work in progress
Guided Goal-setting: How Tailored Menus Shape Energy Conservation
In this paper, I consider a new approach to goal selection for conservation goals, in which the principal designs a menu of goals and incentives tailored towards the agent, and the agent chooses its most preferred goal to pursue. This method, inspired by "guided" goal setting in clinical trials (Shilts et al., 2004, 2009), does not pose a threat to autonomy while ensuring appropriate goal selection (Locke and Latham, 2013). I adapt the model of Harding and HSiaw (2014) and hypothesize that goal performance is higher under guided goals relative to assigned goals while at the same time preventing households from self-setting goals that are either too easy or unreachable.
Guided Goal-setting: How Tailored Menus Shape Energy Conservation
In this paper, I consider a new approach to goal selection for conservation goals, in which the principal designs a menu of goals and incentives tailored towards the agent, and the agent chooses its most preferred goal to pursue. This method, inspired by "guided" goal setting in clinical trials (Shilts et al., 2004, 2009), does not pose a threat to autonomy while ensuring appropriate goal selection (Locke and Latham, 2013). I adapt the model of Harding and HSiaw (2014) and hypothesize that goal performance is higher under guided goals relative to assigned goals while at the same time preventing households from self-setting goals that are either too easy or unreachable.
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