Consumer willingness to pay for eco-labels in China: A choice experiment approach

Abstract

The use of eco-labels has become increasingly popular in China. This study aims to understand whether Chinese consumers are willing to pay for eco-labels and how their willingness to pay (WTP) is determined. Although we find that Chinese consumers are willing to pay more for products that are labeled as having greater energy efficiency (Energy Efficiency Label) or as having been produced using more environmentally-friendly production processes (Environmental Label), some practices have significantly impaired the effectiveness of these labels, e.g. the burgeoning use of eco-labels has led to label confusion; public trust towards eco-labels. The policy implications are discussed in this study.

Keywords:

• WTP
• environmental labels
• energy efficiency labels
• label confusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1648896245193526268&wfr=spider&for=pc

2 For details on these interviews, please see the policy report from this study.

3 The initial plan was to interview shoppers at a home appliance supermarket. However, we found that few people shop for home appliances in supermarkets these days in China with the increasing popularity of online shopping. In order to obtain a sizeable survey pool in a relatively short period of time, we decided to randomly select interviewees at airports and railroad stations, where people had free time and were more likely to accept the survey.

4 We provide a brief description of these aspects in the survey. Please see the appended survey questionnaire for details.

5 For details about how this life cycle cost is calculated, please see Sun et al. (2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71322305,71974124].