Associate Professor Martine Visser and Grant Smith has been involved in an ongoing project involving the role of social norms in lowering household electricity consumption. This entails a natural field experiment where a subset of households across Cape Town from different income groups are provided with information about their relative consumption compared to that of the rest of the city and also their neighbourhood. In total 6310 households are included in the sample. The study has been done in close collaboration with different departments within the Municipality of Cape Town.
The results thus far has shown that providing such information to a treatment sample influenced their electricity consumption significantly. The Cape Town Municipality has been very enthusiastic about these results and requested that the study be extended to pre-paid electricity meters as well. We have also obtained funding from the Water Research Commission to extend the study to water consumption within Cape Town. We are currently in conversation with relevant departments within the Municipality to initialize this second project.