Conjoint analysis of green consumer preferences for electronic products

Abstract

The paper deals with the environmentally friendly consumer behaviour and factors that influence green consumer purchasing. In order to explore the main determinants of green preferences for an electronic device, a choice-based conjoint analysis was applied, due to its power to force respondents to make a trade-off between conflicting attributes. Aggregated results suggest that technical performances are the most important features when purchasing electronic equipment, while environmental characteristics, price and warranty period are rather important, but not crucial. In order to detect subgroups of respondents characterized by heterogeneous preferences that can remain latent in aggregated results, preference-based clustering was performed using k-means procedure. As a result, four clusters were identified, one of which was the subgroup of environmentally aware respondents. Finally, a market simulation was conducted to assess the willingness of consumers to pay for the upgrading of both technical and ecological product features.