Mobilization for energy renovation. Preliminary results of a survey on rational and heuristic thinking of the dwellers.

Abstract

Mobilization for energy renovation. The commonly used policies to encourage the uptake of energy efficient measures in renovations are mostly based on monetary incentives and information provision. Both these approaches have the underlying assumption that dwellers act exclusively as rational homo economicus, who has unlimited intellectual capabilities to calculate long term ROI. However, recent findings show evidence that people have bounded rationality and bounded willpower. A survey was undertaken with the scope of exploring this dual thinking: rational and heuristic. The heuristic aspects are based on social norms, biases such as familiarity bias, endowment effect, affect heuristic and discounting the future. The survey consists of a questionnaire and a choice experiment. The preliminary phase (n=303) shows that householders are mostly rational in their positive attitudes, while they are more balanced in the negative ones. The second part of the survey, the choice experiment, aimed to evaluate the impact of 6 monetary and non-monetary characteristics on choosing between 4 alternative renovation measures: energy efficient windows; roof and wall insulation; heat pumps and PV panels. Preliminary results suggest that cost, CO2 emissions, comfort and expert advice have an impact on all the measures, while visual changes and friend advice are measure dependent. The latter affect only insulation and heat pumps. The impact on the aesthetics affects wall insulation, but it is not the case for geothermal heat pumps. It might be explained by lack of knowledge that is coherent with the feedback from an open ended question. Another finding is that dwellers overestimate the impact of the monetary motivations and underestimate the impact of environmental motivations of their own decisions. The survey shows the necessity to analyse the efficiency of the policy instruments in a wider framework, that takes into account both rational and heuristic aspects of decision making.