Non-monetary incentives and energy conservation

Combating climate change and building sustainable societies is one of the major challenges for nations around the globe. Energy conservation is crucial to addressing this challenge. Here, behavioural changes at the household level can have substantial effects at the macro level. But how can individuals be motivated to adopt energy-saving behaviours? While monetary incentives such as lowering prices for green energy production and consumption, investment subsidies and taxes have been suggested as effective behaviour change measures, they are not always effective, or can have unintended negative consequences. For this reason, but also more generally, non-monetary incentives such as social norm information, status competition and green defaults are studied as measures to promote energy conservation. For some of these incentives, field experiments show remarkable large effects. This contribution provides an overview of selected non-monetary incentives, their effectiveness and public acceptance, and points to desiderata for future research.