Determinant attributes and the compensatory judgement rules applied by young consumers to purchase environmentally sustainable food products

Abstract

Young consumers are known to value environmentally sustainable features in products. In this regard, understanding the determinant green attributes and whether these attributes are able to compensate for the lack or low level of regular attributes can contribute to deepening the understanding of how young consumers decide. Hence, this paper aims to identify the determinant attributes for the behaviour of young consumer environmentally sustainable food purchases and to investigate the compensatory rules applied during pre-purchase evaluation processes. To that end, we employed a quantitative study of both descriptive and causal objectives through a questionnaire. To identify the determinant attributes, descriptive statistics techniques were used, with attributes divided into instrumental and expressive. Whereas for the compensatory rules, a factorial experiment was conducted to test purchase scenarios. We analysed the effect of environmentally sustainable product attributes on purchase intention using the analysis of variance. And, given the additive characteristic of compensatory models, a linear regression model was used to test the hypothesis of the application of compensatory rules for environmentally sustainable food purchase. Results showed that product quality, cleaner production and price are the determinant instrumental attributes valued by young consumers. Health concern, a healthy lifestyle and environmental concern are the determinant expressive attributes. Our inferential results support the hypothesis that young consumers judge environmentally sustainable food attributes under compensatory rules. Thus, high levels of attributes compensate for the low level or absence of others. The implications of such findings in light of consumer behaviour theory are then discussed.