How information stimulates homeowners' cooperation in residential building energy retrofits in China

Highlights: • Information affects homeowners' cooperation directly and indirectly. • Risk perception is a mediator between information and homeowners' cooperation. • Information source credibility moderates information's influence. • Provision of information on retrofitting benefits and service is the most critical. • Positive quality information and understandable technology information are required. The process of residential energy retrofitting needs to be advanced, especially in the hot summer and cold winter (HSCW) zone of China. Good cooperation from homeowners is the key to the smooth project implementation. Some studies have identified four categories of information as important factors affecting homeowners' decision-making in retrofitting. Such information can improve homeowners' cooperation to some extent. This paper investigates the nature of this influence mechanism of retrofitting information, so as to stimulate homeowners' cooperation. The authors, first, explain how the direct relationship between information and homeowners' level of cooperation is validated. Second, under the mediation role of risk perception, we verify the indirect influence of such information. Third, we analyse the variation in the strength of the relationships between information and homeowners' cooperation under the influence of source credibility. It is concluded that providing information on retrofitting benefits and service is more effective for improving homeowners' cooperation. The integrity of building quality information and the understandability, to the homeowners, of technology information need to be considered. Priority should be given to the sources of expert knowledge and published resources, because they are perceived by homeowners to be relatively credible. Policy suggestions are proposed based on the results.