SUSTAINABILITY LIABILITY AS CONTEXT DEPENDENCE IN THE PREFERENCES TOWARD SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

This paper aims to explore individual behaviour within the sustainable development framework through sustainable consumption practices. We use a novel experiment by contextualising the context-dependent choices to examine if preference toward sustainable products is sensitive to the situation faced by consumers. Our findings show that individuals are sensitive to switch their preference when it comes to product availability and supporting infrastructure across product types, especially when it does not fit with their expectations given the contextual situation that the individuals are facing. This behaviour is driven by risk averse and optimistic attitude that are observed in our experiment. Lastly, our regression model asserts previous findings where situations faced by subjects are contextual to their choice of sustainable products, making individuals switch their preference to the common non-sustainable products when the context faced burdening them. Adding these aspects with global sustainable issues is found to be a key driver to direct consumer’s preferences toward sustainable products in promoting sustainable development. Given this, specific strategies are needed by relevant stakeholders (the government and industry) to maintain consumer’s preferences in each product along with specific contexts embedded to the product in order to ensure sustainable development practices. © 2025 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.