Household preferences for load restrictions: Is there an effect of pro-environmental framing?

Highlights: • Pro-environmental information makes households marginally more likely to consider contracts that entail load restrictions. • Households exposed to a pro-environmental information are less negative towards the number days with load restrictions. • Pro-environmental information works better among households who are not already engaged in pro-environmental activities. In this paper, we investigate whether a pro-environmental framing influences households' stated willingness to accept restrictions on their electricity use. We use a split-sample choice experiment and ask respondents to choose between their current electricity contract and hypothetical contracts featuring various load controls and a monetary compensation. Our results indicate that the framing makes respondents marginally less likely to prefer their current contracts. We find significant pro-environmental framing effect related to a few contract attributes, particularly the framing reduces respondents' willingness-to-accept compensation for the number of days with load control and for flexibility to choose appliances for load control. The results further show that the framing affects respondents who do not perform pro-environmental activities. Our finding suggests that a pro-environmental message, which is inexpensive to include in a proposed contract, may influence the preferences of people who are less engaged in pro-environmental activities.