Digital Nudging for More Ecological Supermarket Purchases

Abstract

Most western countries are currently using more of the earth’s resources than they produce, exhausting the earth and causing permanent damage. This study aims to determine how people can be nudged towards more ecological consumer behavior when using web supermarkets. An experimental website and a survey are created to explore consumers’ willingness to try more ecological alternatives. The results confirm that digital nudges – more specifically, the decoy effect and the middle-option bias – can guide participants towards more ecological meat alternatives, as compared to a website without nudges. We also investigated the influence of price tags by also including scenarios without price information – with and without nudging. Without price information, our participants steered towards more sustainable (organic) alternatives even without nudges; the effect of the nudges was limited in these situations, without price tags, only the middle-option nudge managed to convince participants to take the even more ecological, vegetarian alternative. The combined results lead to the belief that the decision to not opt for organic meat is primarily motivated by price, whereas the decision to go vegetarian (arguably even more sustainable) is not motivated by price, but rather by the effect of the nudges.