Abstrakt
The increasing popularity of hybrid and electric cars indicates that people take into consideration environmental characteristics when purchasing a new car. Also recent research has shown that people take information on CO2 emissions into consideration and are willing to pay for its reduction when purchasing a new car.
Despite this it is yet unclear how the effect of CO2 information interacts with people's attitudes. In order to evaluate the effect of environmental attitudes on car purchase informed with CO2 emissions we analyze choices made by respondents in a vehicle choice experiment conducted on-line on a sample of 1580 car owners living in Philadelphia and Boston metropolitan area.
To assess the environmental attitudes two alternative measures were applied: i) the new environmental paradigm measure (NEP) assuming one's moral values to be the core concept of environmental attitudes and ii) general ecological behavior measure (GEB) assuming that people's general attitudes can be derived from their attitude-relevant behavior. The result of two alternative models, 1) a random parameters logit model with attitudes in interaction with CO2 emission and 2) a latent class logit model with assignment to classes based on GEB's theta and alternatively NEP scale show that people high in environmental attitude are willing to pay more for CO2 emission reduction when purchasing a new car.
However the effect of environmental attitudes on the derived WTP for CO2 emission reduction is rather small.