Transporting behavioral insights to low-income households: A field experiment on energy efficiency investments
Journal of Public Economics · 2026 · Bettina Chlond、Timo Goeschl、Martin Kesternich、Madeline Werthschulte
中文摘要
既有的行为洞察在应用于代表性不足的目标人群时可能难以推广。因此，能够识别此类外部有效性失灵、从而指导大规模政策部署并为后续设计改进提供依据的迭代方法日益重要。我们在规模最大的能效援助项目之一中实施了这一方法，开展了一项涉及1800户低收入家庭的田野实验。尽管经过了广泛的协同设计审查，大多数行为洞察仍被证明无效或低效。值得注意的是，损失框架干预适得其反，降低了项目的参与率。我们按公共资金的边际价值（Marginal Value of Public Funds, MVPF）对各洞察进行排序，识别出表现优于那些被专家和普通公众视为有前景的替代方案的“意外赢家”。我们的分析表明，低收入家庭特有的因素（如稀缺性）会从根本上改变行为反应，因而需要进行有指导的部署，以优化未来的公共援助设计。
Abstract
Established behavioral insights may not generalize when applied to under-represented target populations. Iterative approaches that identify such external validity failures to guide policy deployment at scale and to inform subsequent design refinements gain importance. We implement this approach in a field experiment involving 1800 low-income households in one of the largest energy efficiency assistance programs. Despite extensive co-designed vetting, most behavioral insights proved ineffective or inefficient. Notably, loss-framed interventions backfired by reducing take-up. We rank insights by their Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF), identifying ‘unexpected winners’ that outperform alternatives rated as promising by experts and laypeople. Our analysis suggests that factors specific to low-income households, such as scarcity, fundamentally alter behavioral responses, necessitating guided deployment to optimize future public assistance design.