Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We discuss behavioral strategy in the context of a popular workplace electric vehicle (EV) charging field experiment with a large automaker. Workplace charging programs have attracted a lot of attention as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. However, providing infrastructure alone does not guarantee adoption or sustainable use of common pool resources. In this paper, we study the effect of two different deterrence mechanisms for corporate sustainability that aims to increase the efficiency of resource use. We analyze more than 3000 real-time transactions across different facilities of the same firm. This includes data from one of the largest workplace charging programs in the United States. To study the effectiveness of both deterrence mechanisms, we use a regression discontinuity design with algorithmic bandwidth optimization to separately identify treatment effects. Using high-frequency data, we comment on the relative effectiveness of pricing versus normative strategies. We also evaluate performance from employees and a sub-population of managers where we find evidence for heterogeneity in behavioral responses. Our findings provide new evidence that group norms can play an important role in behavioral compliance with corporate sustainability initiatives and the efficient use of common pool resources in workplace charging programs.