How Advertising Drives Pro-Environmental Willingness to Pay : Evidence from a Within-Participant Between-Group Experiment

Pro-environmental willingness to pay (WTP) refers the willingness of sharing the costs of environmental management of both private and public sectors. Green advertising may promote pro-environmental WTP because of it could increase environmental awareness, however, little is known about this relationship. We investigate how green advertising influences pro-environmental WTP with an online questionnaire-based experiment using a strategy that combines both within-subject and between-subject designs. We adopt this strategy to mitigate the noise and bias from one single design. Based on 390 responses, we find that green advertising significantly increases participants' pro-environmental WTP, and advertising environmental degradation is more effective in promoting pro-environmental WTP when compared to advertising environmental improvement. The differentiated impact caused by the different message frames is properly attributed to loss aversion, which is more likely to be triggered by the information on environmental degradation. In addition, we show that pleasure mediates the positive effect of green advertising, and emotional intensity significantly affects such mediating role in negative-framed advertising. This observation can be attributed to the boundary of loss aversion. We also find that prevention focus heightens susceptibility to green advertising, and the relation of environmental concern to advertising effectiveness is inverted U-shaped. Based on the findings, we offer implications for designing green advertisements, such as increasing the usage of visual elements and negative message frames