Forget-Me-Not: The Persistent Effect of Information Provision for Adopting Climate-Friendly Goods

Abstract

It is well documented that people have misperceptions about energy costs. However, there is mixed empirical evidence about the effectiveness of information provision and its persistence over time. Understanding the interplay between information regarding the private and social benefits of low-carbon technologies and identifying mechanisms through which information treatments affect people’s long-term behaviors can help reconcile the mixed findings in the literature. In this paper, we measured the long-term effects of information provision through online experiments involving more than 3,000 households in China. We provided people with information on low-carbon light bulbs’ monetary and climate benefits and observed their purchasing decisions over 10 months. We find that information on private or social benefits leads to a temporary effect on most households and a persistent one on the uninformed. This evidence suggests that information provision works through two different mechanisms: increasing saliency and filling the information gap. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Y. Gao received financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71903006]. M. Tavoni received financial support from the FP7 Ideas: European Research Council [Grant ERC-336155–COBHAM]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4910 .