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Shopping for Green? When Environmentalism and Product Returns Clash.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Shopping for Green? When Environmentalism and Product Returns Clash./
Author:	Williams, Amy Janine.
Description:	1 online resource (112 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-02, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International86-02A.
Subject:	Psychology. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798383592830

Shopping for Green? When Environmentalism and Product Returns Clash.
Williams, Amy Janine.

Shopping for Green? When Environmentalism and Product Returns Clash. - 1 online resource (112 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-02, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2024.

Includes bibliographical references

Product returns plague retailers and customers alike for the added logistical, monetary, and environmental costs. This research examines the latter piece: how environmentalism relates to customer return behavior and how it can be leveraged to reduce return rates. Product returns incur an environmental cost, whether that be with carbon emissions from delivery vehicles, consuming more packaging to resell, or waste if the product ends up in landfill. Consequently, consumers who are environmentally conscious should care about their penchant for returns. We first conducted a lab study to examine the relationship between consumers' environmental consciousness and their return behavior. A survey of 201 participants found that more environmentally conscious consumers were more likely to return. Additionally, when asked how many sizes (of the same item) they would purchase at a time (termed "bracketing"), more environmentally conscious consumers were more likely to purchase multiple sizes. Next, we examined this bracketing behavior from an analytical perspective where we found that environmentally conscious consumers should, in most cases, choose to purchase items one at a time (sequentially) rather than bracketing, which would reduce their environmental impact and, consequently, their return rates would decline. These findings suggest a paradox between a consumer's return behavior as observed in the lab study and the consumer's intention to be environmentally conscious as confirmed in the analytical analysis. Due to this tension, we next conducted a second lab study where we tested an intervention to this behavior on 523 participants. By providing bracketing shoppers with a transparency pop-up message with an environmental bent, we found that we could significantly decrease bracketing behavior and, therefore, return rates. This research could impact the way retailers present product information and help consumers understand blind-spots in their purchase and return behavior, with the ultimate goal of reducing return rates.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798383592830Subjects--Topical Terms:

555998
Psychology.
Subjects--Index Terms:

BracketingIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Shopping for Green? When Environmentalism and Product Returns Clash.
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