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    Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices
    19 Feb 2019Working Paper Summaries

    Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices

    by Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou, and Yanchong Zheng
    Encouraging consumers to purchase a more sustainable product or use resources more responsibly is a key challenge for society. This paper discusses experiments involving more than 7,000 participants to shed light on how information and its presentation regarding sustainable performance can be a tool for enhancing sustainable choices in practice.
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    Author Abstract

    We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability performance relative to other companies, and customer transparency, in which customers receive information about their own sustainability performance relative to other customers. Through three studies with 7,308 participants, we observe that revealing the levels of relative performance is more motivating for customers in the process transparency domain, whereas revealing relative changes in performance is more motivating for customers in the customer transparency domain. We employ structural equation modeling to identify the underlying mechanisms for these results. We show that levels information is more reflective of objective performance comparison, thus strengthening motivation in the domain of process transparency. In contrast, changes information helps to mitigate self-serving attribution biases in the customer transparency domain, thus playing a more significant role in affecting motivation.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: January 2019
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-079
    • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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    Ryan W. Buell
    Ryan W. Buell
    C. D. Spangler Professor of Business Administration
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