Switching on Electricity Demand Response: Evidence for German Households
利用德国家庭调查数据，通过工具变量和内生转换回归模型，发现只有知晓电价的家庭才对价格变化敏感，不知情家庭完全无弹性，建议大规模实施低成本信息措施以促进节能。
Empirical evidence on households’ awareness of electricity prices and potentially divergent demand responses to price changes conditional on price knowledge is scant. Using panel data originating from Germany’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (GRECS), we fill this void by employing an instrumental-variable (IV) approach to cope with the endogeneity of the consumers’ tariff choice. By additionally exploiting information on the households’ knowledge about power prices, we combine the IV approach with an Endogenous Switching Regression Model to estimate price elasticities for two groups of households, finding that only those households that are informed about prices are sensitive to price changes, whereas the electricity demand of uninformed households is entirely price-inelastic. Based on these results, to curb the electricity consumption of the household sector and its environmental impact, we suggest implementing low-cost information measures on a large scale, such as improving the transparency of tariffs, thereby increasing the saliency of prices.