The Influences Of Policy Instruments On Consumers’ Environmental Behavior

With the increasing impact of consumption behavior on the environment,the study of individual behaviors is the new domain in environmental governance.There are many kinds of intervention strategies to promote the individuals’ pro-environmental behavior,and the policy instruments are one of the most important strategies.Despite the implementation of various policy intervention strategies continuously,the emissions of greenhouse gas and the energy consumption form the household sector are obviously contribute to the environmental degradation.The reasons why the policy instruments are inefficiency and in short-term effective are the implementation of many strategies would not match the individual psychological factors.The effectiveness of the policy intervention strategies should be combined with individual psychological reaction.Only on the basis of matching individual psychological needs,it can maximize the effectiveness of the policy intervention strategies.Therefore,analysis of the policy instruments acting on environmental behavior is not only a necessary step to grasp the consumers’ psychological reaction,but also the key to solve the environmental problems.On the basis of consumer behavior theory,environmental behavior theory and social psychological theory,the paper studies the mechanism of policy instruments influence on consumer environmental behaviors by the methods of theoretical and empirical research.It reveals the consumers’ environmental behavior psychology after the implementation of policy intervention,and it develops suitable intervention strategies based on the conduction route.Firstly,it reviews the related theory and finds the breakthrough point of the paper.Secondly,the research builds a conceptual model based on the social influence theory,the consumer behavior theory and the new behavior model.Thirdly,based on the theory of environmental behavior and management theory,the research analyses the mechanism of environmental behavior influenced by internal and external factors and proposes the corresponding research hypothesis.Fourth,based on the questionnaire survey,the research tests the hypotheses through 728 valid samples by using structural equation and multiple regressions.The research checks the origin of grouping variables effect model by constructing nested models.Finally,a list of policy intervention strategies is proposed.The main contents and innovative works are as follows:First,the paper constructs the mechanism model of policy instruments based onpsychological attribution.The current academic researches on environmental behaviors are mainly focused on the psychological variables,and there are few researches on the role of policy instruments on environmental behaviors.It has taken the various policy instruments as the same directly factors in most previous studies.It lacks analyzing the differences according to the different types of policy instruments on the mechanism of environmental behavior,which are the conflicts that many results from previous studies on the influential factors on the environmental behavior.The policy instruments are divided into four types here: command and control instruments,economic instruments,communication and diffusion instruments,and service instruments.According to the internal logic of consumer behavior,the energy saving and carbon reduction behaviors are divided into purchase behavior,curtailment behavior and recycle behavior.It deeply analyzes the differences of consumer psychology affected by four kinds of policy instruments.Based on the specific research variables and different impact paths,the paper constructs the integrated model of consumer environmental behavior-integrated model of psychological attribution and policy instruments.Second,this paper provides empirical evidence that the four kinds of policy instruments affect the environmental behavior in multiple paths.The model is tested by the method of structural equation,and it gets the results.Command and control instruments have a significant effect on the three kinds of environmental behavior.Service instruments have a direct impact on the curtailment behavior and recycle behavior.Command and control instruments and economic instruments have indirect influence on behavior intention through compliance,and finally act on three kinds of environmental behavior.Communication and diffusion instruments indirectly impact on behavior through the identification,and finally affect the three kinds of environmental behavior.They also through the environmental responsibility impact on the intention,and finally influence the environmental behavior.Service instruments affect three kinds of environmental behavior indirectly through perceived behavior control.So,it can be seen that different types of policy instruments have obvious influence paths on the environmental behavior.The results not only reveal the policy instruments in the process of psychological conduction path,but also enrich and deepen the environmental behavior theory,and it provides a paradigm for the further research of environmental behavior.Third,it analyzes the similarities and differences in the total effects of the four types of policy instruments on three kinds of environmental behaviors(purchase,curtailment and recycle).Command and control instruments have the greatest effect on recycle behavior,which indicate that the impact of regulations on the recycle behavior is the most significant;the total effect of economic instruments on purchase behavior is the highest,which show that the economic incentive has a greater effect on purchase for consumers;It has the greatest impacts of communication and diffusion instruments on the recycle behavior,and it means that interpersonal influence and information dissemination have an important role on recycle behavior.Service instruments’ total effect on the purchase behavior is the biggest,which indicate that the current market services are relatively perfect.These suggest that policy instruments are more likely to translate into recycle behavior and purchase behavior.From the comparisons between the four kinds of instruments,communication and diffusion instruments have the largest total effects on the environmental behavior than the other instruments,and it also shows that the two impact paths of identity and responsibility are important for environmental behavior.The second high total effects are command and control instruments.Although the indirect effect of command and control instruments is negative,the total effect shows it has the positive effect on environmental behavior.The effect of economic instruments on environmental behavior is relatively small,which shows that the contributions of this type of instruments are limited.At the same time,lacking of direct effect show that economic instrument has crowding out effects.The total effects of service instruments on the curtailment behavior and recycle behavior are negative,which indicate that the descriptive norms have a significant rebound effect on these two kinds of environmental behaviors.