Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice

Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice 16
Second, given that not all of the required indicators are available for all individuals, we
are faced with sub-samples that are smaller than the total sample. Moreover, these subsamples
may be not representative. To check for this possibility, Figure 1 shows the
frequencies of the ten life satisfaction categories for the complete sample and the various
sub-samples in which the environment-related variables are available (see also Table B4 in
Appendix B). The distributions within these sub-samples are very similar to those within
the complete sample. We therefore consider the sub-samples in which the environmentrelated
questions were asked as adequate representations of the distribution of life
satisfaction.
Figure 1: Frequency distribution of life satisfaction in total sample and sub-samples in
which environment-related variables are available
percent
20.00
18.00
16.00
14.00
12.00
10.00
8.00
6.00
4.00
2.00
0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
life satisfaction
Total Sample
Green products
Recycling
Water conservation
Priority
WTP20
The next section addresses the question whether the apparent positive association between
pro-environment consumption and subjective well-being from Table B3 is robust to the
inclusion of income, country and time dummies, and the controls discussed above.
4 Empirical Results
4.1 Preliminaries
The empirical analysis proceeds in several steps. Subsections 4.1 and 4.2 consider basic
versions of model (4) from subsection 3.1 in which interactions of pro-environment
consumption with individual and societal conditions are omitted. Subsection 4.3 introduces
interactions with indicators of materialistic attitudes, thus checking the proposition that
such attitudes may enhance choice distortions with respect to pro-environment
consumption. Subsection 4.4 considers interactions with measures of education and
familiarity with pro-environmental behaviors.
All 5