Following up on their recent Marketing Science paper, “Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Solar Photovoltaic Panels,” Stern School of Business assistant professor of marketing Bryan Bollinger, Yale University assistant professor of economics Kenneth Gillingham, and colleagues, in cooperation with SmartPower and the Connecticut Clean Energy Investment Fund, received a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE). The grant was part of the DOE’s Solar Energy Evolution and Diffusion Studies program to support solar energy development.


Bollinger and his colleagues aim to rigorously estimate the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and persistence of a variety of novel behavioral strategies that leverage social interactions to accelerate diffusion of solar technology. Another objective of this project is to develop a predictive social network model, with parameters that can be estimated with the data collected, in order to run numerical simulations of the future diffusion of solar technology under different behavioral strategies and in different communities. The program is part of the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, a collaborative national effort to make solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade.

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