Is It Benefiting Me or the Environment? How Context Nudges Green Product Choices

Abstract

Green attribute trade-offs have been identified as one of the significant antecedents of the green gap phenomenon (i.e., the discrepancy between pro-green attitudes and purchase behavior of green products) in literature. This paper focuses on the strategic role of trade-off-related context effects (i.e., compromise effect and asymmetric dominance effect) as behavioral nudges in green marketing. We suggest that the benefit association of green attributes can influence the scope of these two context effects. We use three studies with experimental design to illustrate the said effect across three trade-off scenarios, a range of product categories, and a diverse set of samples. Study 1 (307 participants), Study 2 (312 participants), and Study 3 (259 participants) investigated the hypotheses for trade-offs between green attributes and other conventional product attributes, particularly price, functional performance, and usage/procurement convenience, respectively. The results reveal that when green attributes are associated with user-benefit, the target green option performs better as a compromise option than as an asymmetrically dominant option, whereas when the green attributes are associated with environmental-benefit, the target green option performs better as an asymmetrically dominant option than as a compromise option. Further, this difference in efficacy under environmental-benefit association is less pronounced for individuals high on interdependent self-construal. Additionally, we find that under the environmental-benefit association, an independent self-construal attenuates the efficacy of the compromise effect.