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Making the Invisible Visible: The Impacts of Real-Time Feedback on Indoor Air Pollution
Presented by:
Sefi Roth
Department of Geography and Environment
London School of Economics
Friday, November 22, 2024
12:00 pm-1:15 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
Exposure to ambient air pollution has been shown to be detrimental to human health and has motivated many policies to reduce such pollution. However, given that humans spend 90% of their time indoors, we need to understand the degree of exposure to Indoor Air Pollution (IAP), and, if high, ways to reduce it. We design and implement a field experiment that monitors households’ IAP and then randomly allocates some households to real-time feedback on their air pollution. We find that IAP is worse than ambient pollution on average and for a large fraction of the day, especially when residents are home. We also find that the randomized feedback alone significantly reduces IAP during occupancy time. Furthermore, we explore the mechanisms for our findings and show that people are using more natural ventilation as a result of the feedback (i.e., opening up doors and windows to the outside world). Finally, we find that the treatment leads to more accurate beliefs about exposure to IAP and we estimate the change in welfare from the introduction of the real-time feedback.