Effects of Air Pollution on Consumer Decision-Making Behavior: A Review

Abstract

Purpose/Significance: In recent years, consumer behavior studies have shown that weather and air quality have a significant impact on consumers' purchasing behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the different ways and causes of consumers' responses to weather conditions. However, the existing relevant research results are scattered in different disciplines and lack of summary and sorting of the research topic. By systematically reviewing the impact of air pollution on consumer decision-making, we can fully understand the change of consumer behavior caused by air pollution factors at the macro level and help enterprise managers to develop targeted marketing management strategies to avoid or reduce the impact of air quality on consumer decision-making behavior. Design/Method: This paper systematically reviews the impact of air pollution on consumers' decision-making behavior based on key keywords retrieved from major academic literature databases and search engine websites. In detail, with the framework of the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model in the field of environmental psychology and based on the process perspective, the paper divides the impacts of air pollution on consumer's decision-making behavior into the change of body and mind before consumer decision-making process, change of the decision behavior in the process of consumption decision-making and consumption experience and evaluation behavior after the process of consumption decision making. Conclusion/Findings: By establishing and analyzing the thematic structure of studies on the impact of air pollution, the results show that air pollution has a wide range of impacts on consumers, ranging from health risks to mood changes and from changes in daily habits to changes in consumption behaviors of individuals and groups.