Would consumers pay for environmental innovation? The moderating role of corporate environmental violations.

Abstract

To examine whether firms' environmental innovation can improve consumers' purchasing tendencies, we constructed a mediation model with moderation based on attribution theory. We used the altruistic attribution of firms' environmental innovation as the intermediation role and corporate environmental violations as the moderator, and we experimentally verified the model. The empirical results suggest that firms' environmental innovation positively affects consumers' purchase intention and that the positive effect of eco-product innovation is greater than that of eco-process innovation. Consumers' altruistic attribution of firms' environmental innovation behavior is decreased when an enterprise has environmental violations, which in turn weakens consumers' purchase intention.