Are Consumers Willing to Pay More for Eco-Packaging? Insights from LDA and Conjoint Analysis: Evidence from Republic of Korea

The e-commerce market is rapidly growing, driven by increased non-face-to-face services and digital convenience. However, the expansion of parcel deliveries has substantially increased packaging waste, raising environmental concerns. As ESG (environmental, social, and governance) considerations become critical for sustained competitiveness, eco-friendly packaging has emerged as an important issue in e-commerce logistics. While prior studies have examined consumer attitudes toward eco-friendly packaging, limited attention has been paid to how consumers evaluate and trade off delivery-related eco-friendly packaging attributes at the attribute level. To address this gap, this study applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to news articles to identify socially salient eco-friendly packaging attributes and subsequently employs conjoint analysis to examine their relative importance based on consumer-stated preferences. The results indicate that delivery speed (27.2%), ease of recycling (20.2%), and price (19.4%) are the most influential attributes, suggesting that traditional delivery factors and eco-friendly considerations jointly shape consumer preferences in e-commerce delivery contexts. By disaggregating eco-friendly packaging into delivery-related attributes and empirically analyzing their relative importance and trade-offs, this study provides data-driven insights into consumer preference structures, contributing to the literature on sustainable consumption and e-commerce logistics.