Consumer Behavior in Building Energy Use

Economic theory of customer preference describes consumer behavior as a “set of activities prospective customers undertake in searching, selecting, valuing, assessing, supplying and using of products and services in order to satisfy their needs and desires” (Čavoški and Markovíc 2015). When it comes to research in the field of energy consumption and energy efficiency, there is a lack of common understanding of what consumer behavior is, since it is strongly related to the technical, economic, sociological, and psychological models applied to understand how and why people perform energy-related actions, and to the disciplines which investigate these actions. Hence, consumer behavior might be referred, among others, as occupant behavior and energy behavior. Occupant behavior has been referred as a set of “observable actions or reactions of a person in response to external or internal stimuli, or respectively actions or reactions of a person to adapt to ambient environmental conditions such as temperature, indoor air quality or sunlight” (International Energy Agency EBCP 2013). However, this definition does not take into account individual attitudes and reasons which lead to a specific action, which instead have been intensively studied in social sciences. Energy behavior has been defined as “all human actions that affect the way that fuels (electricity, gas, petroleum, coal, etc.) are used to achieve desired services, including the acquisition or disposal of energy-related technologies and materials, the ways in which these are used, and the mental processes that relate to these actions” (International Energy Agency DSM Energy Efficiency 2014). Energy behavior is the one leading to end-use energy consumption, incorporating two implicit dimensions: the behavior itself and the associated energy consumption (Lopes et al. 2012). Rather than agreeing on unique terms and definitions, this chapter aims at providing an overview of the scope, policy implications, and characteristics of the consumer behavior in building energy use, focusing in particular on the household behavior in the residential sector. To the purpose of this work, all the terms above are assumed to embed energy consumption as subject of investigation; therefore, consumer behavior, user behavior, and occupant behavior are used indifferently.