Consumers' Willingness to Pay for Bioplastic Plant Containers: An Experimental Auction Approach

This study elicites consumers' willingness to pay for an environmentally sustainable good that might not typically be purchased on its own. We isolate the value of these perfectly-complementary, auxiliary goods by endowing consumers with the complete good and giving them the opportunity to pay to upgrade the auxiliary component of the good. We employ a Becker-Degroot-Marschack auction design in a market setting to determine consumers' actual willingness to pay for the auxiliary good. We find consumers are willing to pay a $0.67--$1.12 premium for a bioplastic plant container over a traditional plastic one.