Environmentally Motivated Travel Reduction: The Effects of Availability, Herding Bias, and Self-Monitoring

Shiva Ghorban Nejad and Håvard Hansen
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Shiva Ghorban Nejad: The Norwegian School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway
Håvard Hansen: Emeriti Marketing, 4370 Egersund, Norway

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-14

Abstract: Asking consumers to consume less, or to travel less, does not necessarily make them do so and is, therefore, a key challenge for public policy-makers and green marketers. In this paper, we scrutinize the effect of intuitive decisions/judgments as well as personality differences on consumers’ intentions to consume less. More specifically, we study how the availability heuristic, herding biases, and self-monitoring influence environmentally motivated consumption reduction (EMCR) in a tourism context. Drawing on EMCR and a heuristics-and-biases approach, we present an experimental study designed to test how availability (high vs. low information availability), herding behavior (herd present vs. no herd), and high vs. low self-monitoring influence consumers’ intentions to travel less in the future. The results suggest that the existence of a herd influence environmentally motivated travel reductions. Also, high self-monitors are more capable of sensing the eco-friendly direction of the public opinion in general, and adjust their behavior to align with this, than individuals with a lower self-monitoring tendency. Finally, there is a positive interaction between herding bias and self-monitoring, while we found no significant effect of the availability heuristic on the environmentally motivated travel reduction. The implications of the results and future research avenues are discussed.

Keywords: environmentally motivated consumption reduction; travel reduction; sustainable tourism; availability heuristic; herding bias; self-monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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