Kahn on green nudges and environmental ideology

I saw Matt Kahn present this paper at the POWER conference in Berkeley. It is not surprising, but is nevertheless interesting and previously unexplored. There are, as he notes, some important policy implications regarding targeting messages to recipients that are likely to motivate pro-social behavior. Slate has a column on the research here. Kahn provided this abstract of the paper on his blog:

"Nudges" are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that while the electricity conservation “nudge” of providing feedback to households on own and peers’ home electricity usage works with liberals, it can backfire with conservatives. Our regression estimates predict that a Democratic household that pays for electricity from renewable sources, that donates to environmental groups, and that lives in a liberal neighborhood reduces its consumption by 3 percent in response to this nudge. A Republican household that does not pay for electricity from renewable sources and that does not donate to environmental groups increases its consumption by 1 percent.