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Would consumers pay for environmental innovation? The moderating role of corporate environmental violations

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Abstract

To examine whether firms’ environmental innovation can improve consumers’ purchasing tendencies, we constructed a mediation model with moderation based on attribution theory. We used the altruistic attribution of firms’ environmental innovation as the intermediation role and corporate environmental violations as the moderator, and we experimentally verified the model. The empirical results suggest that firms’ environmental innovation positively affects consumers’ purchase intention and that the positive effect of eco-product innovation is greater than that of eco-process innovation. Consumers’ altruistic attribution of firms’ environmental innovation behavior is decreased when an enterprise has environmental violations, which in turn weakens consumers’ purchase intention.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful advice.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and analyzed are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72002073), the Soft Science Foundation of Guangdong, China (2019A101002048), and the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR20G030003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, China

    Siying Long

  2. School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Zhongju Liao

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  1. Siying Long
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  2. Zhongju Liao
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Contributions

SL formed the framework of this study and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. ZL performed the experiment design and analyzed the data. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhongju Liao.

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Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues

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Long, S., Liao, Z. Would consumers pay for environmental innovation? The moderating role of corporate environmental violations. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 29075–29084 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12811-2

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