2024 best paper award of IJPDLM Emerald Publishing (the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management)

We received this award for our (open access) paper “The impact of social vs environmental sustainability information disclosure on consumer choice of delivery time with varying sustainability concerns” (link: https://lnkd.in/eTCMcgBk)

In this paper we investigate the impact of sustainability information disclosure on consumers’ choice of order-to-delivery lead-time in relation to consumers’ sustainability concern. Based on two choice experiments with participants from the Netherlands (n = 348) and the United Kingdom (n = 1387), we examined the impact of sustainability information disclosure in connection with consumers’ concerns for environmental and social sustainability. We compared the effects of providing information on environmental impact (carbon emission) and on social impact (warehouse workers’ and drivers’ well-being).
Experiment results show that disclosing sustainability impact information significantly increased consumers’ preference and choice for longer delivery times, with equivalent effects for environmental and social impact information. Consumers’ relevant (environmental or social) sustainability concern as personality traits enhanced effects on preferences, as did priming of environmental concern.
Our message to online retailers: tell them why! if you want to influence consumer choice of delivery time for sustainability purposes (eg. nudge consumers to choose a longer delivery lead-time so that you have more opportunities to consolidate) you need to tell consumers why this is good for sustainability!