The Role of Sales Agents in Information Disclosure: Evidence from a Field Experiment
与一家全国性零售商合作，通过实地实验测量能源使用信息披露、客户返利和销售代理激励对节能耐用品需求的影响，发现返利加激励显著提升市场份额，但信息或激励单独作用为零。
With a large nationwide retailer, we run a natural field experiment to measure the effects of energy use information disclosure, customer rebates, and sales agent incentives on demand for energy-efficient durable goods. Although a combination of large rebates plus sales incentives substantially increases market share, information and sales incentives alone each have zero statistical effect and explain at most a small fraction of the low baseline market share. Sales agents strategically comply only partially with the experiment, targeting information to more interested consumers but not discussing energy efficiency with the disinterested majority. These results suggest that seller-provided information is not a major barrier to energy-efficiency investments at current prices in this context. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2327 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.