The Impact of Green Framing on Consumers’ Valuations of Energy-Saving Measures

It is a matter of interest to policy-makers and marketers alike to quantify the impact of environmentally friendly messaging upon consumer decision-making behavior. We quantify the value of such messaging or 'green framing' through a choice experiment where subjects choose technical, home-related energy saving measures (ESMs) after valuing the attributes of a set of alternatives. Green framing is tested through a treatment where the one half of the subject pool is exposed to a scenario description where the energy-savings attribute is formulated as an environmental benefit and the other half a scenario description focussing solely on the economic benefit of the energy-savings attribute. Any significant differences in ESM-attribute valuations are interpreted as caused by green framing. For the experiment we perform a representative online survey among 1084 German residents. Mixed logit analysis reveals that ESM valuations are indeed affected by green framing: financial and environmental descriptions of the energy-savings attribute lead to significantly different attribute valuations, which has obvious marketing and policy implications. We also report statistics on ESM-attribute valuations differentiated by e.g. demographics.

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