Raising the demand for residential green buildings: A general consumer behavior model, the evidence, and the strategies

Abstract

Green buildings have been considered one of the major strategies in response to environmental degradation and risks. However, while well-established standards such as LEED and BREEAM have been promoted for more than thirty years, the prevalence of residential green buildings is still far from satisfactory. Given the past intensive efforts on the “supply” side of green buildings, especially the development of standards and technologies, it is almost sure that the problem is on the “demand” side of the marketplace. Therefore, the current study aims to develop a general consumer behavior model of residential green buildings, focusing on the factors that motivate the consumers' purchase intention, to empirically evaluate the model, and to derive strategy implications. To investigate the proposed model's empirical support and generality, we conducted a comparative empirical study of Taiwan and Mozambique, two distinctively different countries. The results show that the consumers' economic ability and motivation, environmental morality motivation, and socio-psychological motivation have significant effects on the purchase intention toward residential green buildings and that the proposed model has generality and, thus, is applicable to other countries. The theoretical contribution of the current study to green building literature is to develop a consumer behavior model that is strategy-oriented and has generality and to offer empirical evidence. The practical contribution is to provide the practitioners with a deeper understanding of the consumer behavior of residential green buildings and to produce useful insights for the strategies for promoting consumers' willingness to buy.