Green production information transparency and online purchase behavior: Evidence from green agricultural products in China

Abstract

The “lemon effect,” which is the result of information asymmetry and barriers to trust, poses serious challenges to the sustainable development of green agricultural products. Therefore, enhancing consumers’ trust is critical to maintain sustainable purchasing behavior. Information transparency has been widely attention as a marketing tool, and previous research related to agricultural products has focused on the visible information. Based on signaling theory, this study takes an invisible information perspective and empirically investigates how production information transparency of green agricultural products affects consumer trust and online purchasing behavior. The results of structural equation modeling analysis show that production technology information transparency and production means information transparency have different effects on the dimensions of consumer trust (in competence and benevolence). Moreover, trust in competence has a significant positive impact on trust in benevolence; they both have significant impacts on consumers’ online green purchase behavior. The results of this study contribute to signaling theory and the product transparency literature, and offer significant implications to practitioners of the green agricultural sectors.

A study on the influence of product environmental information transparency on online consumers’ purchasing behavior of green agricultural products

“…Sellers provide information on the quality of water in the production of green produce to ensure food safety and compliance with green product quality standards, thereby product environment transparency increases consumers' trust in online sellers, in line with previous studies (Han and Yan, 2019;Castro-González et al, 2021;Giacomarra et al, 2021). The model results show that consumers' competence trust significantly and positively affects online consumers' purchase behavior (β = 0.752, p < 0.001) and benevolence trust also significantly and positively affects online consumers' purchase behavior (β = 0.139, p < 0.05), and H3a and H4 are supported, which indicates that online consumers' trust can enhance their green agricultural products purchase behavior (Mohan et al, 2021;Fu et al, 2022). Interestingly, we found that competence trust has a stronger effect on online consumers' purchasing behavior compared to benevolence trust.…”

“…The online seller publicly provides information about the quality of the soil used in the production of green agricultural products Liu (2013), Fu et al (2022) The seller provides generally consistent information about the quality of the soil used in the production of green agricultural products on various channels…”

“…According to signaling theory, product information can be considered as a signal sent by online sellers to consumers, which influences consumers’ perceived trust and purchase behavior ( Fu et al, 2022 ). In green product sales, Mezger et al (2020) argued that there is an information asymmetry in online shopping, such as users cannot find out product characteristics and consumers are uncertain whether the actual quality of green products is reliable.…”

“…Transparency of product information can reduce information asymmetry and thus enhance consumer trust in sellers ( Fu et al, 2022 ). Compared with ordinary agricultural products, green agricultural products may have more stringent environmental requirements during the growing process, but this type of information is not within the scope of mandatory information disclosure by firms.…”

“…Therefore, this study is based on signaling theory to investigate the impact of invisible information, namely the transparency of environmental information of green agricultural products, on online consumer trust and the impact of consumer trust on purchase behavior. According to Fu et al (2022) , online consumer trust dimensions were selected: competence trust and benevolence trust. To investigate the role of different dimensions of product environmental information transparency on online consumer trust, and the role of competence trust and benevolence trust on online consumer purchase behavior of green agricultural products, To provide a possible reference for the sustainable development of green agricultural products.…”