| Popis: |
This project studies consumers’ behavior in purchasing decisions, when the information about the products is presented with labels. It has been shown that consumers’ decision can have a sizable impact on the environment. That is why governments and NGO’s have put efforts in informing consumers about the impact of their decisions on the environment. In most cases, this information is difficult to understand. Hence, the most common approach to inform consumers has been via labels or ratings. Consumers are frequently exposed to multiple sorts of labels and rankings regarding the quality of products (e.g., when choosing hotels, restaurants). Similarly, the EU energy labels provides useful and informative information regarding the efficiency of electro domestic products. Multiple studies show that these energy ratings have been useful to guide consumers decisions. An effective label or rating will give consumers reliable information regarding the attribute that the label describes. Consumers that value the attribute described by the label can rank products and make a better informed decision. Generally, purchasing decisions require considering multiple dimensions or attributes of a product. The first goal of our project is to analyze whether consumers react and use sustainability and quality ratings differently. In an incentivized experiment, participants will have to make decisions between products depending on their quality, sustainability and price. Quality and sustainability will be presented in the form of ratings. We constructed similar ratings for both product characteristics. We plan to analyze how consumers react to both labels in terms of: - Beliefs: Do consumers believe that the marginal benefit of a better rating is constant or does it change along the scale? (Linear or non-linear ratings) - Behavior: Do consumers value the marginal increase on the ratings at a constant rate? (Linear or non-linear preferences) We expect high heterogeneity in the consumers’ preferences towards sustainability. Hence, we will capture the participants attention towards the different attributes in order to capture heterogeneity in their preferences. We use the methods proposed by Engelmann, Hirmas, van der Weele (2021) to capture heterogeneity in preferences via attention. We use visual-tracing methods (e.g. Mousetracking) to measure the time and order spent looking at the different attributes of the products. The second goal of our project is to understand how do consumers react to changes in ratings. The EU energy label has been rescaled twice in the last couple of decades. Both changes to the labels caused different impacts on the consumers’ decisions. Therefore, we will explore how consumers react to new information about the labels. Namely, we will present participants with the underlying information behind the quality and sustainability labels. In a between-subject design, we will alter the information provided to participants to see if they react towards the new labels differently. We will also test whether we can use the changes in attention after the information provision as a proxy for the potentially heterogeneous treatment effects. Our results will shed light on what information is relevant to provide to consumers and how we can help them make more sustainable decisions with greater ease. |
