Monetary and moral incentives of behavioral interventions: Field experimental evidence from hotel guest energy efficiency programs

The purpose of this study is to measure the pure conservation effect of moral incentives and investigate their potential to reduce energy conservation in non-household sectors. Focusing on the overlap between moral and economic incentives, we employ a field experiment at a hotel to separate moral incentives from economic incentives. We find that although the pure conservation effect of moral incentives was insignificant, moral incentives did reduce hotel guests’ electricity use by 10.3% when saved money in conservation was donated to an environmental protection organization. The result indicates that when we use moral incentives in non-household sectors, it is beneficial to spend saved money for environmental protection to gain people’s support for conservation requests.