Other Business Commons^™

Toward A Sustainable Marketplace: Expanding Options And Benefits For Consumers, Michael G. Luchs, Rebecca W. Naylor, Randall L. Rose, Jesse R. Catlin, Roland Gau, Sommer Kapitan, Jenny Mish, Lucie Ozanne, Marcus Phipps, Bonnie Simpson

Mason School of Business Articles

While popular interest in sustainable consumption continues to grow, there is a persistent gap between consumers’ typically positive explicit attitudes towards sustainability and their actual consumption behaviours. This gap can be explained, in part, by the belief that choosing to consume sustainably is both constraining and reduces individual-level benefits. While the belief that sustainable consumption depends on making trade-offs is true in some contexts, increasingly consumers are finding that more sustainable forms of consumption can provide both an expanded set of options and additional, individual-level benefits. In this essay, we discuss and illustrate an expanded set of options and benefits …