Workplace EV charging congestion threatens corporate decarbonisation targets. Asensio, Apablaza, Lawson and Walsh (Georgia Tech; EPIcenter affiliate Omar I. Asensio) examine whether a tiered price of $1 per hour after 4 hours and injunctive “charging-etiquette” emails can curb charger over-stay across 105 stations and 84 employees. High-frequency session data are analyzed with sharp and dynamic regression-discontinuity around the 2-hour “commute energy” mark and the 4-hour price threshold.
The baseline analysis finds –14.7 % electricity use per session once the $1 h⁻¹ fee starts, and –18.9 % when employees receive etiquette prompts exactly at 2 hours. Normative messages trigger a larger response among managers (–24.7 %) who set peer expectations, yet managers barely react to price (–8 %, n.s.). Annualized, the combined strategy frees roughly one in five charger-hours without extra hardware.
The authors show price effects lasting eight weeks, while normative effects emerge sooner and persist eighteen weeks. Rerunning the analysis using wider and narrow slices of data around the rule change confirmed coefficient stability; placebo checks at a 3-hour cut-point report no effect. Achieving the same conservation with pricing alone would require 150 – 500 % higher hourly fees, underscoring norms as a cost-effective complement.
Distributional insights highlight variations in behaviors between groups of employees: high-status users adopt norms faster, whereas lower-repeat drivers remain price-sensitive, suggesting segmentation opportunities. No demographic data were collected, so equity across wage groups is unknown.
Omar and the coauthors conclude that “group norms can play an important role in driving behavioral compliance when setting EV access policies,” advocating that firms institutionalize etiquette messaging within charging platforms before resorting to costly infrastructure expansion.
This summary was written with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot on July 1st, 2025. Its content was edited and verified by EPIcenter staff and affiliates.
Read the full paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13116