Climate change and global warming are important environmental issues, posing a huge threat to human survival and health. In this context, China proposed the goals of peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality. In addition, air pollution causes substantial deaths and related diseases globally (Cohen et al. 2017). More than one million people die from air pollution in China per year in recent years (Zhao et al. 2019). Automobile exhaust emission is proved to be one dominant factor in deteriorating air quality (Wang et al. 2019a; Pratama et al. 2019). Carrying out automobile recalls for environmental defects (ARED) is a practical move to implement policies of peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality, and can also improve air quality. It is a developing trend to gradually reduce the emission of automobile air pollutants.
ARED refer to the measures taken by automobile manufacturers to eliminate the hazards from automobile emissions, including design and production defects or failure to meet the specified environmental durability requirements. Under China’s current policy, consumers cannot be forced to participate in ARED. Thus, consumers’ voluntary and active participation is the basis for the smooth implementation of ARED.
Evidence shows that the completion rate of ARED is lower than that of safety recall due to the consumers’ low enthusiasm for participating in ARED (He and Jin 2017). Compared to safety hazards, consumers may perceive lower risk from environmental defects, which dampen their participation intention in ARED. Accordingly, understanding what factors can motivate consumers actively participate in ARED is necessary. To the best of our knowledge, empirical investigation in consumers’ participation intention toward ARED is inadequate and needs further examination.
From the perspective of pro-environment, consumers’ participation in ARED can eliminate environmental defects, decrease potential pollutants emissions, and protect the environment, thus it can be regarded as pro-environmental behavior (Steg et al. 2014). Research points out that pro-environmental behaviors are generally in a dilemma, with consumers’ self-interest and pro-environmental behaviors often in conflict (Karp 1996). For example, although green products are good for the environment, they tend to be expensive (Moser 2015). Consumers who choose to buy green products mean that they have to bear high costs. Thus, they can try to act in an environmentally friendly way and contribute to society, or they can maximize their interests without regard to the consequences for the general public. In the context of ARED, although the repair costs are borne by the recalled company, consumers still have to pay for other costs (e.g., time and convenience). Consumers may weigh the benefits and costs of participating in ARED before making a decision (Steg et al. 2014). Research suggests that the benefits and costs analyses are embodied in the concept of perceived value (Kim et al. 2007), which is defined in a broad sense as the overall assessment of what is received (perceived benefits) and what is given (perceived costs) (Zeithaml 1988). From the perspective of consumers, value acquisition from a product or service establishes the fundamental assumption in explaining consumer behavior (Kim et al. 2007; Jin et al. 2015). Kim et al. (2007) proposed the Value-based Adoption Model (VAM) to explain customers’ intention to adopt mobile internet, and regarded perceived benefits and perceived sacrifices as two kinds of antecedents of perceived value. VAM has become an important model to analyze consumers’ adoption of products and services. In addition, the importance of perceived value in pro-environmental behaviors has been addressed. Increasing attention has been paid to the impact of perceived value on consumers’ pro-environmental behaviors (Chiu et al. 2014; Zhang et al. 2020; Wong et al. 2021). For example, Ma et al. (2020) emphasized that the trade-off between benefits and costs affected rural households’ solid waste separation behavior in China. Wang et al. (2020) claimed that the perceived value of the Sponge City Program played a critical role in citizens’ willingness to pay for it. Thus, this study takes VAM as the basic model to construct the integrated model to investigate consumers’ intention of participating in ARED.
Additionally, knowledge is a key variable in pro-environmental behavior research and plays an important role in explaining consumer behavior (Kim et al. 2016; Onel and Mukherjee 2016). For example, knowledge affects individuals’ evaluation of the benefits and costs to perform a behavior (Wang et al. 2018; Shank et al. 2021). Empirical findings of the relationship between knowledge and pro-environmental behavior are more mixed and complex than previously assumed, thereby requiring more exploration (Chan 2001; Bamberg and Möser 2007). In addition, consumer knowledge of environmentally friendly products influences their willingness to buy the products (Wang et al. 2018; Simsekoglu and Nayum 2019). Therefore, including consumer knowledge of ARED as an influencing factor of participation intention is important.
Furthermore, research suggests that pro-environmental behaviors are affected not only by rational predictors and self-interest motivations but also by pro-social motivations (Toft et al. 2014; Gao et al. 2017). Pro-environmental behavior is a special case of pro-social behavior because of its altruistic attributes (Aronson et al. 2002). Personal norms, which are defined as an individual’s sense of moral obligation to perform or not perform a particular behavior, are the core variable to explain pro-social behavior (Roos and Hahn 2019). In the context of ARED, consumers may feel a moral obligation to participate in ARED considering the pro-social attribute of this behavior. Accordingly, personal norms deserve more academic attention in this study. In sum, consumer knowledge and personal norms are added to VAM to develop an integrated research model to better understand consumers’ intention to participate in ARED.
This study makes several contributions. First, to the best of our knowledge, few studies focus on the consumers’ pro-environmental behavior in the context of ARED. This study enriches the knowledge on ARED by investigating the determinants of consumers’ intention to participate in ARED. Second, this study contributes to VAM by extending the application scope of VAM from marketing to pro-environmental field and empirically investigating its explanatory power. We also extended VAM by adding the constructs of personal norms and consumer knowledge to improve the explanatory power of the extended VAM. Finally, this study uncovers key factors influencing consumers’ participation intention toward ARED and provides targeted practical implications for relevant regulatory agencies and automobile firms.