Beyond 'one-size-fits-all' platforms: Promoting personalized energy-saving advice using recommender systems

When analyzing ways in which consumers save energy, most researchers and policy makers conceptually differentiate between curtailment (e.g. unplugging chargers) and efficiency measures (e.g. installing PV cells). However, such a two-dimensional approach is suboptimal from both a conceptual and policy perspective, as it does not consider individual differences that determine energy-saving behavior. We propose a different, one-dimensional approach, applying Campbell's Paradigm through the Rasch model, in which both curtailment and efficiency measures are intermixed on a single scale and ordered according to their behavioral costs (i.e. a combination of cognitive costs, money, effort, etc.). By matching these behavioral costs to individual energy-saving attitudes, we investigate to what extent attitude-tailored energy-saving advice can help consumers to save energy. In this talk, I will present the results of two studies, which show how web-based recommender systems could help policy makers to spur the adoption of household energy-saving measures, combining insights from psychometrics, environmental psychology, and human-computer interaction. Moreover, I will look forward how the same principles could be used to develop food sustainability recommender systems. A recent paper of mine is published in Energy Research and Social Science: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629618302615.  

About the speaker

Alain Starke (1990) graduated cum laude at the Eindhoven University of Technology from the master's program Innovation Sciences in 2014. While writing his master's thesis, he landed a 'Research Talent' grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to pursue a PhD at the Human Technology Interaction group on personalized energy-saving advice, recommender systems, and social norms. Last February, he was awarded a ‘Niels Stensen Fellowship’ to fund one year of postdoctoral research at the department of Information Science and Media Studies (UiB), to work with Christoph Trattner until August 2020 on psychologically-aware recommender systems in the food health and sustainability domain.

Open for anyone interested! Please share in your networks to people interested in this week’s topic. Doors open at 12pm

A light lunch will be served, so please let us know if you are coming by Monday February 10, 12pm: Judith.dalsgard@uib.no