Optimal Producing and Pricing Strategies Under Attitude-Behavior Gap in Green Consumption

Abstract

The attitude–behavior gap is an important issue in the consumer behavior theories. It is widely recognized that what people say is a little different from what they do in green consumption. This gap brings a great challenge for manufacturers to make sales and pricing strategies. Current studies on the attitude–behavior gap mainly focus on the explanation from the perspective of psychology and social behaviors. Few studies have considered quantitatively modeling the producing and pricing strategies of manufacturers under the attitude–behavior gap. This paper fills this gap by proposing a novel equilibrium analysis framework to model optimal strategies in both monopoly and duopoly scenarios. Our findings show that behavior-based strategies consistently outperform attitude-based strategies in both market structures. Furthermore, given the distribution of consumer attitudes towards the green products, we introduce an iterative algorithm to solve the equilibrium pricing strategy. In cases where the distribution is unknown, we demonstrate that manufacturers can obtain valuable insights through social surveys and empirical distributions. Numerical simulations validate our theoretical results, highlighting the practical implications of our model for manufacturers seeking to navigate the attitude-behavior gap.