Teaming and Competition for Demand-Side Management in Office Buildings

Energy conservation at public/office buildings can be tricky, due to the absence of direct incentives, e.g., regarding the electricity bill, and the potentially higher aversion of employees to comfort loss. Few serious games have been developed for motivating occupants to save energy based on peer pressure and/or prizes. However, the design of these games has mostly been based on a genre-adoption approach, while behavioral traits of employees were either considered on average only (rather than per individual player) or not considered at all. In this paper, we analytically study the design of an effective serious game in a work environment involving team competition and prizes. We introduce an innovative model of the energy-consumption decisions of an employee that includes several factors, namely sensitivity to comfort loss, desire for conformance to the social norm, desire for teaming and appreciation of monetary rewards. We formulate the problem of maximizing the effectiveness of the serious game with respect to the team size and the amount of rewards. Based on numerical evaluation with synthetic and real datasets, we show the significant impact of these game parameters to the effectiveness of the serious game as an incentive mechanism for energy conservation in this context.