Consumer behaviour and climate action: insights from a Randomised Control Trial experiment in India's residential cooling sector

Air-conditioning is expected to be the largest consumer of residential energy in India in the future. Good consumer practices related to servicing air-conditioners (ACs) are critical for maintaining high operational efficiency of ACs and reducing leakages of high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant gases. Little information, however, is available about the knowledge and practices of Indian AC consumers in terms of their operational practices. The Government of India's ‘India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP)’ recommends a massive consumer awareness program to inform and change AC user behaviour. Within this context of the ICAP that aims to provide access to sustainable cooling to its masses while minimising its environmental impacts, we undertake a survey and a Randomised Control Trial (RCT) experiment including Indian consumers. The survey and experiment together aim to understand the AC servicing behaviour of Indian consumers and experiment with alternative interventions to influence their behaviour and glean insights for India's energy and climate policies. The behavioural experiment is a unique and novel methodological contribution to India's cooling and climate debate. This research is a first-of-its-kind RCT study of Indian consumers' AC servicing practices. We find that the AC users' knowledge of the importance of preventive servicing is much lower than required. The interventions were successful in enhancing general awareness related to the importance of servicing practices, but not in enhancing technical knowledge related to specific good servicing practices. Our analysis shows that consumers who know about the economic benefit of servicing are more likely to undertake preventive servicing. Our findings highlight the presence of information asymmetry in the Indian residential cooling market and argue that this needs to be addressed for achieving the desired behavioural change and actions to mitigate climate change.