Ethical Consumption and Happiness: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Today’s customers are ethically conscious and prefer those products that are ethically produced without using child labor and harm to animals and nature.This study shows various factors that affect ethical consumption and happiness. We proposed a model explaining effect of ethical purchase on happiness and onwards to repurchase intention. For this purpose this research adopted (Hwang & Kim, 2016) model of factors affecting happiness and repurchase intention and added variables such as ethical consumption, altruism and ethical obligation from (Oh & Yoon, 2014). Using a questionnaire-based survey, the data were collected from 212 respondents to analyze their attitude towards ethical consumption and happiness. To analyze data and test the hypothesis, Structured Equation modeling, PLS algorithm and bootstapping were used. The results showed that guilt positively affects empathy. However, empathy does not affect ethical consumption. Narcissism positively affects self-actualization. While, Self-actualization negatively affect ethical consumption. Ethical obligation also inversely affect ethical consumption however the relationship seems to be insignificant. Surprisingly, Altruism and ethical consumption also seems to have a negative connection. Moreover, ethical consumers didn’t draw happiness out of their purchase, however, happiness positively affected repurchase intention. The results of this study demonstrate the strong associations of the paths from happiness to repurchase intention, happiness to self-actualization, repurchase intention to happiness and self-actualization to happiness.