Research

In the absence of information transmission, how does communication affect voter behavior? We propose a model where agents can persuade others by shaping their social preferences. We incorporate the competing notions of inequality aversion, efficiency, and fairness into agents' distributional preferences. In a public goods-like game, we demonstrate that when messaging is costly, and initial wealth distribution is highly unequal, the inequality is perpetuated by efficiency-driven messages from wealthier agents. We design a laboratory experiment to test how such limited access to communication shapes participant's social preferences, conditioned on the perceived fairness of the initial distribution (luck or effort), the varying cost of messages (free or costly), and the presence of identity cues (revealed or hidden).

How do household energy consumption preferences shift in response to changing energy pricing schedules under the pressures of energy transition, market fluctuations, and energy subsidies? We implement an advanced non-parametric test for analyzing the Random Utility Model of household energy consumption to compare preferences for prices across various use cases (Deb et al., 2023). Our aim is to estimate the effects of changing price schedules for different energy sources across socioeconomic groups to determine whether these changes lead to equitable improvements in household welfare. For this purpose, we compare the 2015 and recently released 2020 rounds of Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) using a representative sample of U.S. households microdata.

Our estimates reveal a general preference for the 2020 price schedule among all households as compared to 2015. However, this preference is less pronounced among energy-burdened groups, suggesting that the pricing adjustments, particularly in elec- tricity, disproportionately benefit wealthier households. For example, the breakdown by racial background shows that the 2020 schedule with 5% decrease in electricity price and 16% increase in natural gas price is preferred by 75% of White households. This num- ber is only 65% for Black and Hispanic households, while the 2020 prices seem more beneficial both in absolute and percentage differences (−7% and 5% respectively).

This suggests that although the 2020 energy pricing schedule was generally favorable, it may not have sufficiently addressed energy burdens experienced by the most financially constrained households. This observation is particularly puzzling given the presence of federal and state programs intended to reduce energy insecurity for lowincome households (Memmott et al., 2021; Murray and Mills, 2014; Carley and Konisky, 2020). These findings could support arguments for more nuanced energy pricing policies that take into account the economic disparities among different demographic groups, similar to the perspectives put forward by scholars of energy poverty (Drehobl, Ross and Ayala, 2020; Hernández, 2016; Brown et al., 2020; Bednar, Reames and Keoleian, 2017; Graff, 2024).