Impact of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness on Green Buying: A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

Green purchase behavior is the purchase of environmentally friendly products. These purchase decisions are a result of many factors which researchers have tried to study in the past. The objective of this study is to understand the green buying behaviour in Pakistan and examine the factors that affect this green buying behaviour. Some cognitive measures such as perceived consumer effectiveness, perceived environmental knowledge and green perceived value that play an important part in shaping attitudes are being studied. These attitudes then lead to behaviors according to the belief-attitude-behavior model on which this study is based. To discover how these beliefs and attitude affect green purchase behavior, a questionnaire is designed. Theory of Planned Behavior has been used in this study to understand and investigate the relation of different variables with green purchasing behaviour. The research findings indicated that an increase in knowledge of consumers regarding environmental issues resulted in them engaging in pro- environmental behavior. The findings were similar for effectiveness and perceived value measures although it was established that people gave more importance to quality and did not strongly feel that their individual actions played a major role  in changing environmental conditions.