Behavioral and Institutional Drivers of Smart Home Retrofitting for Sustainable Urban Transitions

Abstract

Residential buildings are a major source of urban carbon emissions, yet the uptake of smart home retrofitting remains far below the level required to meet decarbonization and sustainability targets. While technical solutions for energy-efficient renovation are well established, less is known about how behavioral, psychological, and institutional factors jointly shape household retrofit decisions and their broader sustainability implications. This study develops an integrated analytical framework that combines UTAUT2 with perceived risk, trust, innovativeness, and regulatory pressure, interpreted through a socio-technical systems perspective, to examine smart home retrofitting in Thailand and its contribution to Sustainable Community Development Goals (SCDG). Survey data were collected from 448 households in Bangkok and Chonburi and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that traditional UTAUT2 predictors such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence do not significantly influence adoption intention in this high-cost retrofit context. Instead, innovativeness, trust, price value, perceived risk, and regulatory pressure emerge as key behavioral and institutional drivers, while facilitating conditions and habits shape actual use behavior. Actual retrofit behavior is found to generate significant economic, environmental, socio-cultural, technological, and public-policy sustainability outcomes aligned with SCDG. These findings demonstrate the limitations of conventional technology acceptance models in infrastructure-based contexts and provide a mechanism-based explanation of how retrofit adoption is driven in high-cost sustainability contexts.