Behavioral barriers to energy efficiency adoption in Kenya: evidence from cookstoves

While increasing attention has focused on behavioral biases as barriers to energy efficiency in developed contexts, little work exists in developing settings. We partner with a major producer of energy efficient, charcoal stoves in Kenya to study how limited attention, product uncertainty, and mental accounting affect the perceptions of energy savings and subsequent technology adoption and usage. We first prompt potential purchasers to exercise greater attention by calculating expected savings from the stove. We then study the relationship between this inattention problem and traditional uncertainty by cross-randomizing whether participants have access to a trial stove for a week before making their purchasing decision. Then, to understand whether households view energy savings through the lens of mental accounting we randomly allocate cash transfers equivalent to the expected savings and test for differences in consumption responses. Finally, we use high-frequency monitors to estimate how cash transfers induce consumption changes in order to benchmark the household’s welfare gains derived from improved energy efficiency. Pilot work is ongoing, and we expect to launch the baseline in Spring 2018.