Hedonic and environmental quality: A hybrid model of product differentiation

Mantovani, Andrea; Tarola, Ornella; Vergari, Cecilia

doi:10.1016/j.reseneeco.2016.06.005

Cited by 24 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(104 reference statements)

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“…Nowadays, firms offer more products with high environmental quality by improving the environmental performance of their products (Mantovani et al,. 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Palacios-Argüello

Gondran

Nouira

et al. 2020

Journal of Cleaner Production

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The purpose of this paper is to identify which environmental criteria can influence the product demand in a context of business-to-business. These criteria can be related to the product's environmental characteristics, to the organization strategies or green practices developed by the firms and to the supplier selection process. Building the conceptual framework from the literature review, a set of environmental criteria were extracted, selected and validated. These criteria were used as a basis for the definition of a questionnaire survey that was sent to 5820 professionals from the food industry in France. The analysis of the 248 complete answers shows that the environmental characteristics of the product can influence product's demand. The most influential attribute to improve the product's environmental quality that increases the product's demand is the introduction of organic labelled raw materials. Besides, the practices that influence mostly the product demand are related to the geographical proximity with the stakeholders. Moreover, the results show that the most important selection criterion when choosing a supplier is the importance given to the quality and environmental performance of components offered. Hence, we show that in the French food market, as opposite to what is usually assumed in many research works, the carbon emissions yield during the production process and transportation process have still no significant impact on products' demand. Lastly, in this work, we quantify the demand increase that company can achieve when enhancing the environmental quality of its products. We show that the impact of the enhancement of those criteria on the demand can have different aspects. 55.6% of respondents advocate for a demand increase and most of them (33.6%) estimate this increase between 5 and 10% of the initial demand. Finally, some respondents (4.8%) indicate that the enhancement of environmental quality does not necessarily increase the demand. However, without efforts to enhance the environmental quality of their products, the demand can decrease. These findings allowed concluding that the business-customers are becoming more and more exigent by privileging organic labelled and local products and making that the companies analyse the geographical proximity with the stakeholders as a key factor during the selection process. We provide companies managers in food industry with better understanding about the environmental criteria that increase the products demand helping them to target the right decisions and to be efficient in their process of environmental quality enhancement. We also assess and try to quantify and give an estimation about the demand evolution regarding the enhancement of product's environmental quality. Our findings are also helpful for Operational Research community.

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“…Nowadays, firms offer more products with high environmental quality by improving the environmental performance of their products (Mantovani et al,. 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Palacios-Argüello

Gondran

Nouira

et al. 2020

Journal of Cleaner Production

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, this term has been increasingly used to define the pure performance of a good and to differentiate it from its environmental attributes. See Lambertini (2013) and Mantovani et al (2016), inter alia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first case, following most of the literature (e.g., Moraga-Gonzalez and Padron-Fumero, 2002; Lombardini-Riipinen, 2005; Deltas et al ., 2013; Ben Elhadj and Tarola, 2015), we assume that the green good is of high quality and the polluting brown good is of low quality. In the second case, based on the observation that quite often brown goods have higher performance than green alternatives (e.g., Weatherell et al ., 2003; Gupta and Ogden, 2009; Mantovani et al ., 2016), we assume that the high-quality good is the one that pollutes whereas the low-quality good is green.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Environmental vs hedonic quality: which policy can help in lowering pollution emissions?

Mantovani¹,

Vergari²

2017

Envir. Dev. Econ.

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ABSTRACT. In this paper we compare two policy instruments that can be adopted to curb carbon emissions. The first is a conventional pollution tax, the second is an environmental campaign raising consumers' awareness about the relative impact of their consumption choices. The comparison is carried out in two different scenarios, depending on whether consumers' aprioristic preferences are such that they value the environmental attribute of a product (environmental quality) or its pure performance (hedonic quality) . In the case of environmental quality, the campaign is preferred under some specific conditions based on consumer heterogeneity, cost-effective analysis, and pollution level. On the contrary, the pollution tax is always preferred in the case of hedonic quality. Therefore, we show that the relative efficiency of the two policy instruments crucially depends on consumers' initial concern for the environment, which may vary across countries due to socio-economic conditions.

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“…The rationale underlying our analysis is that when buying green goods, consumers get a social satisfaction behind the utility traditionally observed: this satisfaction increases with the quality gap between green and brown products, as this gap determines the relative contribution of green consumers to environment protection and thus their social position among peers. The role of relative preferences for environmental goods are also analysed byMantovani et al, (2016), andMantovani and Vergari, (2017), in a framework where the social content of a green good may be in contrast with its intrinsic performance 8. In Lombardini-Riipinen (2005) this subsidy is however unrelated to the pool of consumers buying one of the two variants existing in the market.…”

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confidence: 99%

Relative Tax in a Vertically Differentiated Market: The Key Role of Consumers in Environment

2017

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In this paper, under the assumption that green consumption has (at least partially) a social/psychological dimension, we analyse the effect of a carbon tax when it is imposed on consumers buying dirty products rather than on polluting firms. The amount of the tax paid is determined by the share of brown consumers in the market and the quality gap between variants. We show that this tax can abate emissions without inducing the undesirable relocation effect which can be observed in the case when a unilateral climate policy is imposed on polluting producers.

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Hedonic and environmental quality: A hybrid model of product differentiation

Cited by 24 publications

References 49 publications

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Environmental vs hedonic quality: which policy can help in lowering pollution emissions?

Relative Tax in a Vertically Differentiated Market: The Key Role of Consumers in Environment

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