Conformity and the demand for environmental goods

Fredrik Carlsson, Jorge García and Åsa Löfgren

No 286, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: We test the hypothesis that people conform to certain social norms, i.e. that some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. To investigate consumer preferences for environmentally friendly products, we conducted a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans, share of fair trade beans, and price. Three treatments were used, differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers. More specifically, the respondents in the three subgroups were told that 10%, 50%, and 90% of all other consumers chose the alternative with 100% ecological beans. We find different responses to the treatments across individuals. In particular, we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women, although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women.

Keywords: Conformity; Choice Experiments; Environmental Goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2008-02-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-env and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/9555 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Conformity and the Demand for Environmental Goods (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0286

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().