Perceived Economic Inequality and Environmentally Friendly Consumption: The Moderating Effect of the Presence of Additional Costs

This study adopts an experimental approach. First, by manipulating perceived economic inequality, the study allows for a stronger causal test of its effect on environmentally friendly consumption. Second, and more critically, the study makes explicit the cost structure of environmentally friendly consumption by experimentally varying whether environmentally friendly products require additional costs or are equivalent to conventional alternatives. By rendering this previously implicit assumption explicit and manipulable, this study tests whether the effect of economic inequality depends on the presence of an additional consumption cost, thereby directly examining whether the embedded belief about green costliness underlies the proposed resource scarcity mechanism.