Title: Sustainable values and willingness to pay: an analysis of an analytical technique

Authors: Sri Beldona; Jeffrey P. Radighieri; Herbert Remidez

Addresses: Satish and Yasmin Gupta College of Business, University of Dallas, 1845 E Northgate Dr, Irving, TX 75062, USA ' College of Business, Texas Woman's University, Denton, TX 76204, USA ' Satish and Yasmin Gupta College of Business, University of Dallas, 1845 E Northgate Dr, Irving, TX 75062, USA

Abstract: The concept of sustainability has become popular in today's business environment as consumers' environmental concerns remain a top priority for consumers. With the US consumer market projected to spend over USD 150 billion by 2021 in the sustainability segment, the importance of offering sustainable products has taken a renewed interest. Today, the agenda for sustainability has gained more traction among small and medium-sized businesses. However, such resource constrained companies do not typically have access to sophisticated tools to discern the drivers of consumer's willingness to pay (WTP) for sustainable products. In this paper we study the factors that influence consumer's WTP for sustainable products in the grocery industry. We show how traditional techniques of analysis such as regression analysis failed to bring out deeper insights that can be gained by using no-code machine learning. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed in detail.

Keywords: sustainability; branding; green; organic; machine learning; WTP; willingness to pay; values; consumer behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/JGBA.2021.115769

Journal for Global Business Advancement, 2021 Vol.14 No.2, pp.216 - 240

Received: 08 Mar 2021
Accepted: 08 Mar 2021
Published online: 21 Jun 2021 *

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