A new perspective on breaking through the residents' energy-saving dilemma: Social interaction incentives

Governments play a crucial role in promoting energy-saving behaviors, but relying solely on economic incentives may not sustainably drive these behaviors. This paper develops a resident energy-saving incentive system primarily driven by interactive guidance, combining economic incentives with social interaction. Through multi-agent evolutionary game modeling, it analyzes the evolutionary trends of residents' energy-saving levels under different incentive policies. The results indicate that the interactive guidance-based incentive policy can promote and sustain high levels of energy savings by enhancing the benefits of social interaction. At the same time, due to the weakening effect of social interaction on economic incentives, the implementation cost of interactive guidance is significantly lower than that of economic incentives for achieving the same incentive effect. This paper highlights the necessity of interactive guidance policies in overcoming the energy-saving dilemma of residents and suggests that governments should leverage social interaction tools to establish non-economic incentive mechanisms to improve the efficiency of residents' energy-saving behaviors.