Putting Information into Action: What Explains Follow-Up on Home Energy Audits?

Resources for the Future Discussion Paper 15-34

28 Pages Posted: 14 Jul 2015 Last revised: 11 Jan 2017

See all articles by Karen L. Palmer

Karen L. Palmer

Resources for the Future

Margaret Walls

Resources for the Future - Quality of the Environment Division

Lucy O'Keeffe

Resources for the Future

Date Written: July 13, 2015

Abstract

Consumers often invest in information when faced with choices that have uncertain payoffs. Homeowners considering improvements or retrofits in order to lower their energy bills may decide to have a home energy audit, a professional assessment that identifies where a home is losing energy and recommends improvements that will lower energy use and costs. Follow-up on audit recommendations varies widely across households. We explore the reasons for these differences using data from a multistate survey of over 500 homeowners who have had energy audits. Our findings suggest that two sets of factors are important in explaining audit follow-up: factors related to the costs of retrofits and those related to the features and quality of the audits. Our findings have implications for policies to encourage the use of audits and suggest that the quality of the information and how it is delivered have important consequences for the role of audits in reducing energy consumption.

Keywords: energy efficiency, economics of information, energy retrofits

JEL Classification: L94, L95, Q40

Suggested Citation

Palmer, Karen and Walls, Margaret and O'Keeffe, Lucy, Putting Information into Action: What Explains Follow-Up on Home Energy Audits? (July 13, 2015). Resources for the Future Discussion Paper 15-34, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2630120 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2630120

Karen Palmer (Contact Author)

Resources for the Future ( email )

1616 P Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
United States

Margaret Walls

Resources for the Future - Quality of the Environment Division ( email )

1616 P Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
United States

Lucy O'Keeffe

Resources for the Future ( email )

1616 P Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
94
Abstract Views
817
Rank
499,092
PlumX Metrics