Energy-efficient Home Appliances Research Articles

From Awareness to Action: How Knowledge of Energy-Saving Labels Drives Sustainable Consumer Behavior Towards Energy-Efficient Home Appliances in Indonesia

From Awareness to Action: How Knowledge of Energy-Saving Labels Drives Sustainable Consumer Behavior Towards Energy-Efficient Home Appliances in Indonesia

Can machine learning predict environmental attitudes and beliefs?

ABSTRACT Beliefs and attitudes regarding climate change significantly influence public support for environmental policy regulations and willingness to engage in voluntary actions. This paper endeavours to forecast public perceptions concerning global warming, anthropogenic climate change, support for environmental tax policies, and the inclination to purchase energy-efficient home appliances. Leveraging data from the European Social Survey, we employ four machine learning techniques to anticipate individuals’ environmental beliefs and attitudes. Across various settings, our analysis achieves an accuracy of over 70% in identifying environmentally conscious respondents.

Unraveling the Paradigm of Household Energy Consumption: Environmental Impacts and the Transition to Energy Efficiency

Amidst global climate change and natural resource degradation challenges, adopting energy-efficient home appliances is becoming increasingly crucial, especially in developing countries like Indonesia. Java Island is the country’s economic and industrial center with the highest domestic energy consumption. This study aims to analyze the influence of knowledge about eco-labels and environmental consciousness, mediated by self-efficacy, on the willingness of consumers in Java to adopt energy-efficient household appliances. This study utilizes the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) theoretical framework. Data were collected from 210 respondents through a survey disseminated through social media, and analysis was conducted using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method within the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework. Results show that eco-label knowledge and environmental consciousness significantly contribute to willingness to purchase energy-efficient appliances, with self-efficacy as an essential mediator. The findings present new insights into sustainable consumer behavior and provide practical recommendations for policymakers and practitioners in formulating effective promotional strategies to increase the adoption of energy-efficient home appliances in Indonesia. As such, this study extends the green consumer behavior literature by exploring the mediating role of self-efficacy in a developing country context.

Urban Households’ Investment Behaviour Towards Home Appliances in India: Do Gender and Neighbourhood Effect Matter?

This study assesses the influence of women’s bargaining power and the peer or neighbourhood effect on urban households’ investment behaviour towards home appliances, specifically refrigerators and air conditioners. The impact of women’s bargaining power has been demonstrated in different domains, including household expenditure/investment decisions, technology and clean fuel adoption, children’s education, and so on. Since women primarily operate household appliances, for example, refrigerators, we argue that the former could impact investment decisions related to appliances. Additionally, we study the neighbourhood effect as the acquisition and choice of appliances, vehicles, and new technologies and the reduction of household energy consumption heavily rely on information from the neighbours. This communication dynamic reduces perceived social and technological uncertainties related to the product. Therefore, we hypothesise that household appliance ownership accelerates when there is increased use in the neighbourhood. Analysis based on data from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2005 & 2012) shows that women’s education and property ownership are positively related to refrigerator and air conditioner ownership. The neighbourhood effects on the same have also been found to be positive and significant. This study, in sum, provides new insights into the factors that influence urban households’ investment behaviour towards appliances, and in terms of policy implications, these findings could be useful in the promotion of energy-efficient home appliances as we are aiming for net zero emission in the decades to come.

Why energy-efficient behaviors are delayed? Exploring the moderating role of procrastination in green ticks experiment probing household refrigerator upgrading

Information and behavioral biases will affect consumers' intertemporal decisions on investment in energy-efficient products. This study aims to discover the moderating effect of irrational procrastination, as a key behavioral bias, on consumers' delayed decision on upgrades to energy-efficient appliances and to explore possible interventions to address the delays caused by procrastination. In this regard, a field survey was carried out among 153 households in Singapore using a structured questionnaire about their awareness of green ticks, procrastinatory behaviors, intention of delaying refrigerator upgrade, as well as the demographic variables. The results show that green ticks alone have negligible influence on upgrades to energy-efficient appliances. With green ticks taken into consideration, consumers less procrastinating are more likely to avoid such delays in refrigerator upgrade, which can be seen in the lower hyperbolic discount rate. Furthermore, the strategy of presenting information about the costs of delayed purchase will mitigate the behavioral deviation born of procrastination. Quantitative findings of the study have several policy implications regarding intervention measures to push consumers to purchase energy-efficient home appliances earlier, such as adding the costs of delayed purchase to energy labels, emphasizing the huge impact of procrastination on energy saving, and popularizing energy-efficient appliances in high-income groups.

Exploring Consumers’ Purchase Intention on Energy-Efficient Home Appliances: Integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior, Perceived Value Theory, and Environmental Awareness

Extensive energy consumption has incurred global environmental problems such as climate change. Home appliances are highly used products and consume large amounts of energy. When widely applied, energy-efficient home appliances promote energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, people’s intention to purchase these home appliances merits research attention. In this study, a comprehensive model was developed using the theories of planned behavior, perceived value, and environmental awareness. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey, to which 448 valid responses were returned, and analyzed using partial least squares. The results indicated that consumers’ intention to purchase energy-efficient home appliances was positively affected by their attitude toward purchasing the appliances. Such attitude was significantly and positively affected by functional value, price value, environmental value, and environmental awareness. However, consumers’ attitudes toward purchasing these appliances were not significantly affected by emotional value or social value. Suggestions were proposed on promoting consumer intention to purchase these home appliances according to the research results.

Understanding energy-efficiency choices through consumption values: the central role of consumer's attention and trust in environmental claims

PurposeThis study examines how consumption values influence consumers' purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances in South Africa, an emerging market. The study further investigates the mediating role of consumers' attention to energy-efficient labels affixed on home appliances while making a purchase decision and the moderating effect of consumer trust in the environmental claims.Design/methodology/approachUsing a quantitative approach, this study relied on self-administered questionnaires to collect data from 505 household representatives in South Africa's Gauteng Province. The proposed conceptual model was empirically tested using structural equation modelling, moderation and mediation analyses.FindingsThe results revealed that economic, emotional and social values can only influence consumers' intention to purchase energy-efficient appliances if consumers pay attention to the energy-efficiency label affixed on the appliance. Functional value, however, has a significant direct impact on purchase intention. Moreover, the results indicate that trust in energy-efficiency labels strengthens the effect of functional and emotional values on consumers' attention to energy-efficiency labels.Originality/valueFindings of this study highlight the importance of capturing the attention of consumers to energy-efficiency labels during the buying process as well as increasing their trust in those labels. Results indicate that consumers are more attracted to the functional and social values that energy-efficient appliances provide. This study is of particular interest to policymakers, retailers and manufacturers, as it sheds light on key strategies to implement to effectively promote the purchase of energy-efficient household appliances in South Africa.

Consumer Preference for Energy Label in the Purchase Decision of Refrigerator: A Discrete Choice Experiment Approach in the East Coast, Malaysia

Energy label is a widely used policy instrument to increase consumer awareness of energy-efficient home appliances. It helps consumers make better informed purchasing decision intending to save on the electricity bill. The increase in energy efficiency for a household can generate significant energy savings and emissions reduction which can reduce environmental impact. The energy label targets to fight climate change, protect the environment and is significant to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study presents the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on the East Coast, Malaysia to investigate the consumer preferences for energy label in the purchasing decision of a refrigerator. Multinomial logit (MNL) and mixed logit (ML) models are specified to measure the attributes that consumers assess when choosing refrigerators. This study focuses on four attributes, namely energy star, energy consumption, energy saving and refrigerator price. Findings show that consumers have responded positively to the labels, in which about 88.11% of respondents are willing to pay to get better quality appliances that promote a safe environment while 11.89% of respondents are not willing to pay. The findings are useful in improving the effectiveness of existing energy efficiency and labelling programs to accelerate the adoption of energy-efficient technology in Malaysia. Hence, the implementation of energy label promotes energy-efficient appliances, which is in line with SDG Goal 7: Ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.

Antecedents of Consumer’s Purchase Intention Towards Energy-Efficient Home Appliances: An Agenda of Energy Efficiency in the Post COVID-19 Era

This study focuses on the energy efficiency in the past COVID-19 era and targeted the young population of Pakistan who are facing the critical situation of COVID-19 era and much aware that this situation will badly affect the energy situation when COVID-19 will end and they also aware that energy efficient appliances will be the most valuable products after the COVID-19 era. Data was collected from five major cities of Pakistan and analyzed by applying structure equation modelling through smart-PLS 3.3. Results show that knowledge of eco-labels has significant impact on perceived functional values, green trust and purchase intention of energy efficient home appliances. Results further indicate that consumers social responsibility has significant impact on personal norms and purchase intention of energy efficient home appliances. Moreover, functional value and green trust mediates the relationship of knowledge of eco-labels and purchase intention of energy efficient home appliances. Furthermore, attitude towards energy efficient appliances mediates the relationship between consumers social responsibility and purchase intention but surprisingly no mediating affect of attitude between consumer social responsibility and purchase intention of energy efficient home appliances. This study presents an antecedent model for predicting energy-efficient home appliances based on consumer awareness. This study will help companies for technology innovation and improvements in the efficiency of household appliances are among the key functional values that companies should emphasize, in order to attract consumers to value the surprising energy-saving effects of appliances.

Boosting the choice of energy-efficient home appliances: the effectiveness of two types of decision support

ABSTRACT Consumers’ limitations in assessing the lifetime cost of household appliances may sustain the much-cited energy efficiency gap. We analyse the impact of an individual’s energy and investment literacy and two different types of decision support on the ability to identify the appliance with the lower lifetime cost in an online randomized controlled trial among two independently chosen samples of the Swiss population. In a decision task, participants choose between appliances with different lifetime cost. One treatment offers a short education programme on how to calculate the lifetime cost of an appliance – via a set of information slides. The second treatment provides access to an online lifetime-cost calculator tool. We find that pre-treatment energy and investment literacy are positively associated with the probability of identifying the appliance with the lowest lifetime cost. Evidence in this paper suggest that both decision aids boost identification of energy-efficient appliances. We discuss strategies to scale up these boosters.

Bridging Green Gaps: The Buying Intention of Energy Efficient Home Appliances and Moderation of Green Self-Identity

This study investigates the factors influencing the buying intention of energy-efficient home appliances in Bangladesh. It also develops a conceptual framework that integrates additional constructs with the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and borrows questions from past literature. Employing a convenience sampling technique, a total of 365 completed structured questionnaires were gathered from various super shops in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was thereafter used to analyze the data with the AMOS 21. The study established that environmental knowledge, attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control significantly affected the consumers’ buying intention of energy-efficient home appliances (EEHA). The result revealed a significant relationship between environmental concern, environmental knowledge, subjective norms, eco-labeling, and attitude towards buying. It also confirmed that the green self-identity moderates the existent relationship between the attitude and buying intention of energy-efficient home appliances, while environmental knowledge does not. The research advances numerous policy suggestions to managers or marketers, as well as future research directions.

Marketing efficiency of energy-efficient electrical home appliances in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region

Marketing efficiency of energy-efficient electrical home appliances in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region

An empirical study of purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances: the influence of knowledge of eco-labels and psychographic variables

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to empirically evaluate the antecedents of consumers’ purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances.Design/methodology/approachA self-administered questionnaire has been used to gather data from the targeted representatives of the population. Quota based on age and convenience sampling techniques were used to select the participants of the study, as it is a suitable technique in situations where the possibility of getting a complete sampling frame is difficult. More than 73% of the population of Pakistan is aged below 34 years (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Based on this information, the current study has allocated more than 75% quota to consumers who are below 35 years.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal that all antecedents have significant impact on consumers’ purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances. Environmental concern, green trust and products’ functional values are most influencing factors in the purchase of energy-efficient home appliances.Originality/valueThis study is related to energy-efficient home appliances in Pakistan. Systematic literature suggested the need to analyze the antecedents of energy-efficient appliances. This study helps the practitioners and marketers to understand consumers’ behavior regarding the purchase of energy-efficient home appliances.

An empirical study of consumers intention to purchase energy efficient appliances

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical framework of consumers’ purchase intention of energy efficient home appliances.Design/methodology/approachNon-probability quota based on age and education and purposive sampling technique have been used to assess data collected by a questionnaire survey.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal that consumers’ knowledge of eco-labels, environmental concern and perceived consumer effectiveness are the important predictors of purchase intention. However, the positive relationship between green trust and products’ functional value was found insignificant. It is believed that consumers’ are skeptical about products’ functional benefits.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough this study has presented a holistic approach to assess consumer purchase intention for energy-efficient home appliances, there are some limitations of the current study. First, this study has focused on consumer intention to purchase energy-efficient home appliances rather than actual purchase of appliances. Ajzen (1991) argued that intention is the accurate and immediate measure of actual, but gaps exist between intention and the actual behavior of the consumers (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). Consumers’ intentions may not always result in actual behavior. Thus, to expand research applicability, researchers should include actual behavior of consumers by conducting interviews or collecting data from the same consumers after an interval of three to six months. Second, the study has focused on consumers’ psychographic variables, there may be many other factors such as technological variables, government and pressure group influence and media impact on consumer intention to purchase energy-efficient home appliances. Future studies can integrate the impact of these potential variables on consumer purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances with the same model. The third limitation is related to the methodology of this study, the quantitative method has been used in this study. Future studies may use qualitative and mixed methods to better understand consumers’ inclination of purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances in Pakistan. Besides, a qualitative study will be helpful to explore new variables that are essential in the decision-making of consumers for the purchase of energy-efficient home appliances in Pakistan. Pakistan is a developing country where the majority of the people are belonging to the middle-class; there may be many other important factors that affect consumers’ purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances. Therefore, an in-depth qualitative study would be helpful to explore those variables in the context of a developing country.Practical implicationsEnergy consumption has posed serious threats to the sustainability of the environment and endangered the lives of many species across the globe. Environmental degradation due to unsustainable consumptions has provided ample opportunities to the marketers that led to the development of sustainable products such as energy-efficient home appliances. In this study, the antecedent of purchase intention of energy-efficient appliances includes attitude, functional values, perceived consumer effectiveness, consumers’ knowledge of eco-labels, environmental concern and green trust. Although researchers have extended TBP to predict consumers’ purchase intention of energy-efficient appliances, studies lack to provide a holistic view from consumers’ perspective. Consumers’ concern for the safety of the environment depicts consumers tendency to purchase environmentally friendly products and promote less hazardous products. Marketers should incorporate environmentally friendly benefits to the product that serve to attract maximum consumers and maintain harmony with the environment. Consumers’ knowledge of eco-labels, green trust and functional values are a vital construct that needs focus in term of the energy-efficient appliances purchase decision. Eco-labels are one of the emerging marketing tools that serve to guide consumers related to products environmentally friendly attributes and contribute to the acceptability of products. Marketers can use eco-labels to differentiate green products from conventional and establishes consumers’ trust in product performance.Originality/valueThis study is relevant to energy-efficient home appliances. Systematic literature of previous studies suggested the need to conduct and examine the antecedents of energy-efficient home appliances in developing markets. This research highlights that perceived consumer effectiveness is the most influencing factor affecting intention. The implications of this study would be helpful in understanding consumers’ behavior toward the purchase of green products in developing markets.

Empirical evaluation of the antecedents of energy-efficient home appliances: application of extended theory of planned behavior

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to predict the antecedents of consumers' purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances. This study incorporated two additional constructs (knowledge of eco-labels and knowledge of eco-labels) in the model of the theory of planned behavior. Consumers' enhanced trust for energy-efficient products is crucial to purchase intention. The second construct is consumers' knowledge of eco-labels. Knowledge of eco-labels would help to assess consumers' tendency toward environmental problems and intention to purchase energy-efficient home appliances.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a quantitative approach using a survey (questionnaire) method to collect data of respondents. Non-probability quota based on age and convenience sampling techniques were employed to select the participants of this study.FindingsThe findings of the study revealed that consumer knowledge of eco-labels, green trust, subjective norm, attitude and perceived behavioral control have positive influence on purchase intention of energy-efficient home appliances.Originality/valueEco-labels are served as a marketing tool to distinguish producer's products from others. Prior studies have only focused on consumers' general knowledge. This study helps marketers to understand and design strategies to generate more value for green consumers. This study also contributes to the literature on green marketing by employing the theory of planned behavior.

Behind the scenes: Why are energy efficient home appliances such a hard sell?

This paper wishes to add to the rich literature of studies exploring the reasons behind the energy efficiency gap. To this direction, it presents the results of a stated preference survey conducted on a representative sample of Greek households via computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI) in the context of the “Consumer Energy Efficiency Decision making (CONSEED)” project. The survey was designed and conducted so as to reach every type of household and gather information on the factors influencing households’ energy efficiency choices. The emphasis was given on certain issues that previous studies identified as needing further research, such as the impact of EU labelling scheme on consumers’ decision-making, the connection between pro-environmental behaviour and willingness to invest in more energy-efficient appliances and the role of peer effects, misinformation about current electricity prices and imperfect understanding of energy operating costs on the energy efficiency gap. The findings of the survey are not an end-to-itself but a vehicle for behavioural research in energy efficient decisions. The data collected and analysed can be used to populate theoretical models regarding energy efficiency gap and determine the degree to which each factor contributes to the phenomenon. Moreover, they could help decision-makers in better understand the energy paradox, and, thus, could contribute to crafting better public policy responses that would maximise private and social benefits associated with the adoption of energy-efficient choices.

Willingness to Pay for Energy Efficient Appliances: The Case of Lebanese Consumers

A contingent valuation study was conducted to elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) of Lebanese citizens for five types of energy-efficient home appliances: washing machines, air conditioners, televisions, light bulbs, and refrigerators. A face-to-face survey is designed to this end, with data collection achieving a sample of 605 households geographically representative of the Lebanese population. A multivariate Tobit model was used to gauge the effects of socio-demographic characteristics, attitudes, perceptions, behavior, and experience on the WTP across all these appliances, while accounting for potential correlations between these WTP values. Findings provide evidence of the importance of several socio–demographics in determining WTP for more energy efficient appliances, such as income, education, and age, and the importance of perceptions and experience covariates, not least the implementation of energy labelling and the cost of electricity. In terms of policy implications, this study highlights the need to legally enforce a shift in payment mode from renting per capacity (kW) to purchasing per power (kWh) consumed for electricity in the back-up power sector, and the immediate introduction of a local labelling scheme for home appliances.

Purchasing intentions of Chinese consumers on energy-efficient appliances: Is the energy efficiency label effective?

Abstract Along with the continuous improvement of China's economic level, residents began to pursue high-quality living standards. However, unreasonable consumption patterns and habits caused serious environmental deterioration. Starting from the demand side, the present study explores the influencing factors of Chinese consumers' purchase of energy-saving household appliances, concentrating on the impact of energy efficiency labels on consumer behavior in China. Through combining the Norm-activation Theory model and the Theory of Planned Behaviour model, this study adds information label as the external factor influencing the purchase of energy-saving household appliances according to the research purpose, and analyses the influence of economy and trust on the path of information label. Based on the results, consumers' reference willingness to energy efficiency label information exerts the greatest impact on their intention to purchase energy-saving household appliances, indicating that the guiding role of energy efficiency labels is effective. Nevertheless, the suspicion of label information and economic constraints hinder the conversion from reference willingness to purchase intention. In addition to information labels, consumers' purchase attitudes towards energy-saving products, personal norms and subjective norms significantly affect consumers' purchase intention. Therefore, the current work puts forward relevant policy recommendations on how to promote consumers to purchase energy-efficient home appliances and better exert the guiding role of energy-efficient labels.

The government’s optimal subsidy scheme under Manufacturers’ competition of price and product energy efficiency

As motivated by various Chinese government’s subsidy schemes (e.g., promoting energy-efficient home appliances in 2007, energy-saving automobiles in 2010, and green and efficient agricultural machinery in 2018), we study a government’s optimal subsidies for energy-efficient products in a market with two competing firms. The firms differ in their production costs and compete on their product prices and product energy efficiencies. The government subsidy scheme specifies the amount of subsidy and the certification threshold of the energy consumption level below which the product is certified for certain energy-efficiency/saving and is thus qualified for the subsidy. We first derive the subgame Nash equilibrium of the product prices and product efficiency strategies given the subsidy scheme. Interestingly, we find that if the subsidy is too low, it is possible that the low-cost firm will produce an uncertified product while the high-cost firm will produce a certified product. Furthermore, we derive the government’s endogenous optimal subsidy scheme under three different objectives, i.e., minimizing the total energy consumption, the average energy consumption per product, as well as the average energy consumption per unit of GDP. While previous studies show that minimizing the first two objectives are equivalent in a monopoly manufacturer setting, we show that they are not equivalent in our duopoly competition setting, and we demonstrate that minimizing the average energy consumption helps to sustain the product variety/duopoly outcome. Counterintuitively, when minimizing the total energy consumption, inducing the low-cost firm to produce an uncertified product and the high-cost firm to produce a certified product is optimal under some conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that both the objectives of minimizing the average energy consumption per product and per unit of GDP result in the same equilibrium market structure.

Influence of Changing Behavior and High Efficient Appliances on Household Energy Consumption in Thailand

Energy consumption in the commercial and residential buildings in Thailand has been increasing at a rate of five per cents a year. Concerning this issue, the Thai government has launched several campaigns to promote energy saving habits and replacement of high energy efficient appliances. However, those campaigns do not demonstrate how large impact of such activities on energy saving in households. This research aims at investigation of the potential of energy savings from changing behavior and high energy efficient appliances in the detached houses in Bangkok neighborhood areas. The latin hypercube method was used to generate two hundred combinations of forty-eight variables covering occupancy schedules and energy efficient home appliances. Such data set was then used to perform total energy consumption by using the eQuest 3.65 model. The regression coefficient, ß, was used to identify the most influent parameters on home energy consumption. It was found that changing behavior on higher-wattage appliance significantly affects the total energy consumption. The most significant activities affecting energy consumption are using electric fans instead of air conditioners when the room temperature is acceptable, upgrading plasma TV to LED TV, and replacing fluorescent light bulbs with LED bulbs.