 Pro-environmental behavior and rational consumer choice: Evidence from surveys of life satisfactionHeinz Welsch and Jan Kühling () Journal of Economic Psychology, 2010, vol. 31, issue 3, 405-420 Abstract: This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the hypothesis of decision error in environmental-friendly consumption. Existing evidence suggests that people make systematic mistakes in affective forecasting that lead to suboptimal decisions. The paper hypothesizes that such errors are important in the context of the private provision of environmental goods and shows in a simple theoretical model that decision errors imply a non-zero net marginal utility at the chosen level of environmental-friendly consumption. Using life satisfaction as a proxy for experienced utility, the empirical analysis finds a positive and significant association between life satisfaction and pro-environmental behavior, which is consistent with environmental-friendly consumption being less than individually optimal. The results are robust to controlling not only for socio-demographic characteristics but also for differences in environment-related personal attitudes. Keywords: Consumer; choice; Pro-environmental; behavior; Behavioral; economics; Life; satisfaction; Experienced; utility; Affective; forecasting (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:31:y:2010:i:3:p:405-420 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.