Search

Packaging waste makes up more than 10% of the landfilled waste in the United States. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies (N = 4,103) document the perceived environmental friendliness (PEF) bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging with additional paper to be more environmentally friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. The PEF bias is driven by consumers' "paper = good, plastic = bad" beliefs and by proportional reasoning, wherein packaging with a greater paper-to-plastic proportion is judged as more environmentally friendly. We further show that the PEF bias impacts consumers' willingness to pay and product choice. Importantly, this bias can be mitigated by a "minimal packaging sticker" intervention, which increases the environmental friendliness perceptions of plastic-only packaging, rendering plastic-packaged products to be preferable to their plastic-plus-paper-packaged counterparts. This research contributes to the packaging literature in marketing and to research on sustainability while offering practical implications for managers and public policy officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Member countries of the United Nations have pledged to ensure access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for all by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 7). However, energy poverty continues to be a significant challenge for billions of people. Empirical research established a connection between energy poverty and traditional public health indicators such as overall mortality rate, but relatively little is known about its holistic impact on public health and in particular on health vulnerability. This research establishes a holistic measure of public health using panel data from 143 countries between 2000 and 2016 to analyze the impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability. Using Ordinary Least‐Squares (OLS), fixed effects, system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and quantile regression approaches, our results show that reducing energy poverty mitigates health vulnerability. Energy poverty amplifies the susceptibility to negative health outcomes (sensitivity) and diminishes a population's capacity to respond to public health crises (resilience). The analysis also reveals a heterogeneous impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability associated with the socio‐economic development level of the region, with the largest increase being in more developed and high‐income regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the weight of a server have an influence on how much food diners order in the high-involvement environment of a restaurant? If people are paying for a full meal, this has implications for consumers, restaurants, and public health. To investigate this, 497 interactions between diners and servers were observed in 60 different full-service restaurants. Diners ordered significantly more items when served by heavy wait staff with high body mass indexes (BMI; p < .001) compared with wait staff with low body mass indexes. Specifically, they were four times as likely to order desserts (p < .01), and they ordered 17.65% more alcoholic drinks (p < .01). These findings provide valuable evidence in recent lawsuits against weight discrimination, and it suggests to consumers who decide what they will and will not order at a restaurant--such as a salad appetizer, no dessert, and one drink--than to decide when the waiter arrives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]