The unintended sustainable consequences of free upgrade: How unearned preferential treatment reduces sustainable behavior

Jihao Hu, Zhengzheng Xu, Lisa C. Wan and Wei Wu

Annals of Tourism Research, 2025, vol. 110, issue C

Abstract: The prior research on unearned preferential treatment has merely focused on its impact on consumer reactions or firms' performance (e.g., customer satisfaction, repurchase intention), with its sustainable consequences underexplored. In addition, holding the resource abundance account, past work on promotion tools (e.g., price discounts) has mainly examined positive social outcomes. Through a series of studies (N = 8402), combining field and experimental data with actual behavior measures (e.g., actual towel usage, click-through rate), this research demonstrates that, due to its unique exclusive nature, receiving unearned preferential treatment can situationally enhance consumers' psychological entitlement, which, in turn, renders consumers' decreased sustainable behavior. Intriguingly, marketers can reverse this negative effect by strategically harnessing a status-signaling appeal of sustainable behavior.

Keywords: Actual behavior; Psychological entitlement; Sustainable behavior; Unearned preferential treatment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:110:y:2025:i:c:s016073832400149x

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2024.103872

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