A framework for informing consumers on the ecological impact of products at point of sale

ABSTRACT

The use of intelligent information technologies has the means to provide ecological information just-in-time, thus alleviating consumers' cognitive burden at the time of purchase. We propose a computational framework for supporting consumer awareness of the ecological impact of products they consider purchasing at point of sale. The proposed framework permits consulting multiple information sources through diverse access interfaces, combined with a recommendation engine to score product greenness. We evaluate our approach in terms of usability, performance, and user-influence tests through two conceptual prototypes: an online store and an augmented reality interface to use at physical stores. Our findings suggest that providing ecological information at the time of purchase is able to direct consumers' preference towards products that are ecological and away from products that are not; consumers also express willingness to pay slightly more for ecological products. The experimental results obtained with the interface prototypes are statistically significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological impact
• consumer decision
• augmented reality
• recommender systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Satu Elisa Schaeffer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-7208

Sara Elena Garza http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2260-0552

Juan Carlos Espinosa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9336-9928

Sandra Cecilia Urbina http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5542-4877

Petteri Nurmi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8262-6434

Laura Cruz-Reyes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4541-1642

Notes

1. Available at https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api.

2. An open-source tool for statistics, available at https://www.r-project.org/.

Additional information

Funding

The work was funded by SEP-PROMEP under grant 103.5/13/7269 and Academy of Finland grant 296139 (Sampling in Pervasive Sensing Systems).