Thorsten Staake

University of Bamberg · Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik, insb. Energieeffiziente Systeme

Studies regularly demonstrate how well intelligent agents (IAs) can support humans or are demonstrably superior to them in some areas. Given that some tasks likely remain unsuitable for even the most intelligent machines in the mid-future, work in hybrid teams of humans and IAs—where the capabilities of both are effectively combined—will most likel...

Contagious diseases that affect young children place a great burden on them and their families. Proper hand hygiene is an important measure to reduce the disease burden, however, its implementation in day care centres is challenging. This paper introduces a digital intervention to support independent and good handwashing among young children. The i...

Information systems (IS) are frequently designed to leverage the negative effect of anchoring bias to influence individuals' decision-making (e.g., by manipulating purchase decisions). Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the explanations of its decisions through explainable AI (XAI) have opened new opportunities for mitigating biase...

Due to the advent of digital learning environments and the freedom they offer for learners, new challenges arise for students' self-regulated learning. To overcome these challenges, the provision of feedback has led to excellent results, such as less procrastination and improved academic performance. Yet, current feedback artifacts neglect learners...

Forecasting electricity demand plays a critical role in ensuring reliable and cost-efficient operation of the electricity supply. With the global transition to distributed renewable energy sources and the electrification of heating and transportation, accurate load forecasts become even more important. While numerous empirical studies and a handful...

Early implementation of interventions at a young age fosters behaviour changes and helps to adopt behaviours that promote health. Digital technologies may help to promote the hand hygiene behaviour of children. However, there is a lack of digital feedback interventions focusing on the hand hygiene behaviour of preschool children in childhood educat...

In the learning journey of young children, rewards are ubiquitous. Yet, psychologists and behavioral economists question the success of rewards and even claim that they displace intrinsic motivation, a phenomenon referred to as motivation crowding out. While information systems can help children learn everyday tasks, it is unclear if and when digit...

Heat pumps play an important role in the energy transition. They can extract renewable energy from the air or ground and increasingly replace fossil heating systems in buildings. In operation, however, heat pumps often consume more electricity than necessary due to incorrect settings and installation deficiencies. Although many setting and installa...

The ubiquity of information technology makes it possible to provide individuals with personalized, context-specific, and timely feedback at low marginal cost. This allows for highly scalable behavioral interventions that can support behavior change even for frequent, habitual, and incidental behaviors. Despite the well-documented potential of feedb...

The advance of Machine Learning (ML) has led to a strong interest in this technology to support decision making. While complex ML models provide predictions that are often more accurate than those of traditional tools, such models often hide the reasoning behind the prediction from their users, which can lead to lower adoption and lack of insight....

Companies are pinning high hopes on competitive advantages through data analytics. So far, value gains through analytics have been demonstrated for IT-heavy and data-rich business areas. Yet, research has paid little attention to value creation through data analytics in the plethora of companies with limited data (i.e. having transactions in the hu...

Hand hygiene plays a key role in the prevention of infections. However, there is still a lack of hand hygiene practices among both healthcare professionals and the public. Electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems have the potential to improve the situation by giving an accurate assessment of hand hygiene behavior and by placing digital interventi...

Hand hygiene plays a key role in the prevention of infections. However, there is still a lack of hand hygiene practices among both healthcare professionals and the public. Electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems have the potential to improve the situation by giving an accurate assessment of hand hygiene behavior and by placing digital interventi...

The growing role of digital learning environments in education poses new challenges to individuals’ self-regulated learning which may exacerbate self-control problems (ie, procrastination) if not addressed. The present study explores the role of social norms in information systems to support university students by encouraging online learning. Based...

Heat pumps embody solutions that heat or cool buildings effectively and sustainably, with zero emissions at the place of installation. As they pose significant load on the power grid, knowledge on their existence is crucial for grid operators, e.g., to forecast load and to plan grid operation. Further details, like the thermal reservoir (ground or...

More and more organizations are compensating the greenhouse gas emissions caused by their products and services through carbon offset programs. From the customers’ perspective, the mitigation of negative externalities associated with their demand may increase the utility derived from the (then guilt-free) consumption. In particular in settings wher...

Digitalization enables an ever-increasing opportunity to promote resource conservation by providing timely consumption feedback to individuals. Yet, in multi-person households, appliances and fixtures are often shared, which makes it difficult to deliver person-specific feedback for each user. In this paper, we tackle this problem for household's m...

Renewable energy systems (RES) in the residential sector, like photovoltaic systems, heat pumps and battery storage, are cornerstones of a sustainable energy supply. Nevertheless-and despite major fiscal stimuli-private investment in such technologies has not yet reached a satisfactory level, also because sale of such products is time-consuming and...

Battery systems and charging infrastructures are essential, cost intense, and partly interchangeable building blocks of electric mobility. Although both building blocks are expected to develop favorably in the coming years, their current limitations hinder the adoption of electric vehicles. As their advancement competes for limited resources, it is...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Hotel guests changed their resource-use behaviour when they received feedback on their consumption in real time, even though they did not know that they were part of a study and had no financial incentives. Behavioural interventions provided by digital technologies are a scalable and cost-effective policy instrument for fostering resource conservat...

Current research on the driving performance and energy consumption of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) considers several criteria, including electric reachability, load to the electric grid, and the share of distances that can be driven electrically. However, prior studies do not distinguish between different dri...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Whether the personal views of journalists affect their publication decisions is a much debated question in communication science. In a comparative survey of German and Italian journalists using the example of the euro crisis, Andrea Weitzel shows not only that colleagues, superiors and the editorial line are more important than one's own views. She...

Feedback interventions have proven to be effective at promoting energy conservation behaviour, and digital technologies have the potential to make interventions more powerful and scalable. In particular, real-time feedback on a specific, energy-intensive activity may induce considerable behaviour change and savings. Yet, the majority of feedback st...

In an attempt to channel sales activities, companies often focus on ‘high value targets’ that offer attractive prospective returns. In liberalized electricity markets, commercial customers with high electricity demand constitute such high value targets. The problem when acquiring new customers, however, is that the electricity consumption is not kn...

Traditionally, Information Systems (IS) research focuses on the use and development of IS within and between organizations. This lens dates back to when IS use was mostly confined to professional contexts. Over the last decades, the application of IS has experienced a strong expansion to private contexts, where a large share of IS investments, incr...

Hightlights: - Techno-economic model analyzing profitability of PV-battery systems. - Heterogeneity analysis based on 4190 real-world load profiles. - Predictor for optimal PV-battery system configuration for individual households. - Large variance in profitability, even for households with comparable annual demand. - Good prediction accuracy with...

Tailored energy efficiency campaigns that make use of household-specific information can trigger substantial energy savings in the residential sector. The information required for such campaigns, however, is often missing. We show that utility companies can extract that information from smart meter data using machine learning. We derive 133 feature...

Inattention and imperfect information bias behavior toward the salient and immediately visible. This distortion creates costs for individuals, the organizations in which they work, and society at large. We show that an effective way to overcome this bias is by making the implications of one’s behavior salient in real time, while individuals can dir...

In Europe and the US, hot water use accounts for 13–18% of the average home’s energy consumption, compared to just 4 and 6% for lighting and cooking, respectively. As water heating mostly relies on oil, gas, and electricity, hot water use has been identified as an important target of many carbon reduction programs. We propose and describe a system...

Companies pay high prices for detailed customer information (e.g., income, household type) for gaining insights and conducting targeted marketing campaigns. We argue that companies can utilize predictive analytics artifacts to derive such information from existing customer data in combination with freely available data sources, such as open governm...

Information system (IS) have not only become indispensable in professional contexts, but can also serve as a platform for data-based interventions targeting issues for humanity. Providing individuals with concrete feedback on their current behavior has been shown to foster sustainable behavior. So far, research on the real-world impact and underlyi...

With knowledge on the photovoltaic potential of individual residential buildings, solar companies, energy service providers and electric utilities can identify suitable customers for new PV installations and directly address them in renewable energy rollout and maintenance campaigns. However, many currently used solutions for the simulation of ener...

Decentralized photovoltaic (PV) battery systems have recently received great attention from consumers around the world. PV battery systems allow consumers to reduce their dependence on the local electricity supplier at lower or equivalent costs. However, the profitability of PV battery systems depends greatly on the local meteorological conditions...

Achievement of the ambitious environmental sustainability targets requires improvement of energy efficiency practices in private households. We demonstrate how utility companies, having access to smart electricity meter data, can automatically extract household characteristics related to energy efficiency and adoption of renewable energy technologi...

Tailored energy efficiency campaigns that make use of household-specific information can trigger substantial energy savings in the residential sector. The information required for such campaigns, however, is often missing. We show that utility companies can extract that information from smart meter data using machine learning. We derive 133 feature...

Keywords: Green IS, feedback, voluntary carbon offsetting, behavioral change, field experiment Modern life all across the globe depends on energy – whether in business or in private context. The increasing demand drives well-known problems on different levels (e.g., scarcity of natural resources, pollution of the environment, energy security). Th...

In the domain of energy consumption, good intentions do not necessarily imply sustainable behavior. Information Systems (IS) can promote energy efficiency by providing users with information about their behavior. While IS research has developed several models explaining adoption and usage of various technologies in the organizational context, less...

This paper presents a supervised classification model, where the indicators of correlation between dependent and independent variables within each class are utilized for a transformation of the large-scale input data to a lower dimension without loss of recognition relevant information. In the case study, we use the consumption data recorded by sma...

Wer eine Energieberatung in Anspruch nimmt, kann seinen Energieverbrauch und die damit verbundenen Energiekosten erfahrungsgemäss oft erheblich senken. Wie aber gelingt es Energieberatern, Haushalte mit unnötig hohem Energieverbrauch ausfindig zu machen? Forscher der ETH Zürich und der Universität Bamberg (Bayern) ermöglichen das mit einem Algorith...

L’expérience a montré que les personnes qui ont recours à un service de conseil en énergie peuvent souvent réduire considérablement leur consommation et donc les frais correspondants. Mais comment les conseillers énergétiques parviennent-ils à identifier les foyers dont la consommation énergétique est inutilement élevée? Les chercheurs de l’ETHZ et...

In the promotion of sustainable consumer behaviour, it is important to establish a mental relation between one's behaviour and its environmental impact. High hopes rest on timely feedback on personal energy consumption in order to create this link. Great efforts are being put into the development of information systems to achieve this, and smart me...

Green information systems have been shown to contribute to environmental sustainability and help to prevent associated problems. Private households account for 25% of primary energy consumption in western countries, and therefore hold a great potential to curb the use of fossil fuels and prevent climate change. As such, green information systems sh...

Utilities increasingly leverage knowledge on their customer's household characteristics in their energy efficiency programs. Examples of such characteristics include the number of persons per household, their employment status, or the type of dwelling they live in. This information allows utilities to personalize energy efficiency campaigns, which...

The increasing adoption of in-vehicle data recorders (IVDR) for commercial purposes such as Pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance is generating new opportunities for transportation researchers. An important yet currently underrepresented theme of IVDR-based studies is the relationship between the risk of accident involvement and exposure variables that...

Perishable goods are still a major challenge for supply chains. Temperature fluctuations and other disruptions can occur at various stages of a distribution network. Without sensor technologies, these disruptions are often not detectable in early stages of the supply chains. As a result, losses accumulate at the end of supply chains where a lot of...

This study investigates the role of information systems in stimulating energy-efficient behavior in private households. We present the example of Velix, a web portal designed to motivate customers of a utility company to reduce their electricity consumption. In particular, we consider the effectiveness of goal setting functionality and defaults in...

Detecting when a household is occupied by its residents is fundamental to enable a number of home automation applications. Current systems for occupancy detection usually require the installation of dedicated sensors, like passive infrared sensors, magnetic reed switches, or cameras. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of digital electric...

Elaborating demand side management strategies is crucial for integrating electricity from renewable sources into the electrical grid. Though future demand side will largely depend on an automatic control of larger loads, it is also widely agreed upon that consumer behavior will play an important role as well - be it by purchasing respective automat...

Vehicle sensor data enable novel, usage-based insurance premium models known as ‘Pay-As-You-Drive’ (PAYD) insurance, but pose substantial challenges for actuarial decision-making because of their inherent complexity and volume. Based on a large real-world sample of location data from 1572 vehicles, the present study proposes a classification analys...

Isolated environmental campaigns focusing on defined target behaviors are rolled out to millions of households every year. Yet it is still unclear whether these programs trigger cross-domain adoption of additional environment-friendly behaviors (positive spillover) or reduced engagement elsewhere. A thorough evaluation of the real net performance o...

The strong effects of descriptive normative feedback ("how you compare to others") on an individual's electricity consumption have been documented in the IS literature. Here, we extend prior research on reference group effects ("whom to compare with") by defining the relevance of the reference group in terms of similarity in contextual factors as o...

Ubiquitous IS enables novel services and business models, yet require a careful balancing of consumer privacy concerns (PC) - induced by the provision of particular sensors and information types - with functional performance in order to maximize acceptance. For the exemplary case of Usage-based Insurance (UBI), this paper presents a design science...

Hot water usage accounts for 16% of household demand for energy, much more than lighting and cooking (5% each) and is comparable to electricity usage for appliances (21%). As a means of helping consumers to save hot water, we present a novel self-powered water consumption sensor that enables direct consumption feedback. We equipped 91 Swiss househo...

When it comes to conserving electricity, it is crucial for users to know how much energy is consumed by individual appliances. However, the technical feedback provided by existing energy consumption feedback systems in the form of dry numbers and intangible units is not appropriate for most users. To address this shortcoming, we developed PowerPedi...

Counterfeit trade is amulti-billion dollar industry affecting anever-wider range of goods andmarkets. Despite the diversity of counterfeit products in terms of complexity, manufacturing techniques, investments in production facilities, potential dangers or value for the users, and degrees of conflict for the counterfeit producers with the local aut...

Smart meters can measure the electricity consumption of a household at a fine temporal granularity. By adequately processing this aggregated data an estimation of the consumption of individual appliances can be retrieved and used to provide novel services, such as personalized recommendations on how to reduce the overall energy consumption of the h...

In der Versicherungswirtschaft ermöglichen ubiquitäre Informationssysteme neuartige Prämienmodelle nach dem Pay-Per-Risk (PPR) Prinzip. In PPR Tarifen sind Prämien nicht vertraglich fixiert, sondern in gewissen Grenzen variabel und werden basierend auf objektiven Sensorinformationen in regelmässŸigen Intervallen neu bestimmt. Für zwei Fallbeispiele...

The worldwide adoption of smart meters that measure and communicate residential electricity consumption gives rise to the development of new energy efficiency services. Several particularly promising applications involve the disaggregation of individual appliances within a particular household in terms of their energy demand. In this paper we prese...

The escalating rate of energy consumption underpins the need to set goals that promote a reduction in CO2 emissions. In 2011 the transport sector contributed 23% to the total EU CO2 emissions; road transport alone was responsible for 71% of this 23% compared to 12% from aviation transport. Corporate car drivers drive, on average, three times more t...

In this paper we develop a method and relevant feature constructs for the measurement of accident risk exposure from a large sample of real-world GPS data that includes accident and accident-free drivers. For trip frequency and accumulated driven distance features, an evaluation of their discriminatory power is given based on computational results....