We describe a social game that we designed for encouraging energy efficient
behavior amongst building occupants with the aim of reducing overall energy
consumption in the building. Occupants vote for their desired lighting level
and win points which are used in a lottery based on how far their vote is from
the maximum setting. We assume that the occupants are utility maximizers and
that their utility functions capture the tradeoff between winning points and
their comfort level. We model the occupants as non-cooperative agents in a
continuous game and we characterize their play using the Nash equilibrium
concept. Using occupant voting data, we parameterize their utility functions
and use a convex optimization problem to estimate the parameters. We simulate
the game defined by the estimated utility functions and show that the estimated
model for occupant behavior is a good predictor of their actual behavior. In
addition, we show that due to the social game, there is a significant reduction
in energy consumption