消费者是否关注当地能源成本?来自家电市场的证据

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We cannot reject that consumers respond to lifetime energy costs in the same way they respond to purchase prices under a wide range of assumptions. These findings run counter to the popular wisdom, which motivates energy standards, that energy costs are systematically undervalued due to various behavioral phenomena. They imply that electricity pricing that deviates from social marginal costs, due to failure to incorporate pollution externalities or due to other features in rate design, can have substantial distortionary effects on demand.