Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Strategies that provide informationabout the environmental impact of activitiesare increasingly seen as effective toencourage conservation behavior.This article offers the most comprehensive meta-analysis of information based energy conservation experiments conducted to date. Based on evidence from 156 published field trials and 525,479 study subjects from 1975-2012, we quantify the reduction potential of information based strategies for energy conservation. On average, individuals in the experiments reduced their electricity consumption by 7.4%.Our results also show that strategies providing individualized audits and consulting are comparatively more effective for conservation behavior than strategies that provide historical, peer comparison energy feedback. Interestingly, we find that pecuniary feedback and incentives lead to a relative increase in energy usage rather than induce conservation.We also find that the effect varies with the rigor of the study, indicating potential methodological issues in the current literature.