An energy consumption rewards system to incentivize environmentally conscious social behavior

This paper outlines an idea of creatively incentivizing home-owners to conserve electricity through a socially competitive lottery-based rewards system. The core idea of this work is in leveraging the power of social network influence to make consumers participate and compete in a lottery so that the resulting engagement consistently enhances the population's energy spending awareness. The potential value of such a system in generating energy and monetary savings/revenue is investigated via simulation of social influence processes in an agent based simulation framework. The study encompasses three analysis cases: a lottery system with no communication between consumers, a system with the added social influence, and a "fall-back" scenario where people may return to their old habits of not conserving electricity while still communicating among themselves. To model these analysis cases, a standard independent cascade model is employed with influence success thresholds varied between 1% and 10%. The paper concludes by summarizing the simulation results. Pertinent aspects such as generation of lottery prize money, and expected impact on energy savings is also discussed.