Is there a spatial heterogeneous effect of willingness to pay for ecological consumption? An environmental cognitive perspective

The cultivation and promotion of residents’ willingness to pay for ecological consumption (WTPEC) is a necessary support which urges enterprises to implement cleaner production and guarantees socially sustainable development. Most existing studies focus more on the characteristics of residents ‘economic attributes, but less on their internal psychological factors. In this paper, we propose a spatial clustering model based on the data of Chinese general society survey and geographic environment statistics to discover the spatial heterogeneity effect of residents’ WTPEC under different types of regional environmental characteristics and employs a hierarchical logistic regression model to test the impact of residents’ environmental cognition on their WTPEC. We find that, in Northeast China, residents’ WTPEC is more likely influenced by their attributes and characteristics; in West China, their WTPEC is mainly affected by their environmental cognitive competence; in Eastern and Southern China, by their environmental cognitive attitude and cognitive competence; in Northern China, more vulnerable to their environmental cognitive attitude and competence and their self-social identity. From the fitting of the overall model, residents’ environmental awareness exerts a significant impact on the formation of their WTPEC, which is better revealed in our Willingness-Region Stratification based model. According to these findings, we finally put forward our suggestions for policy application. [Display omitted] In this paper, the factors affecting residents' willingness to pay for ecological consumption are classified into two modules: regional characteristic attributes and residents' environmental cognition. We intend to find the spatial differences of residents' WTPEC under different types of regional environmental characteristics by using a spatial clustering model and to test the impact of residents' environmental cognition on their WTPEC between different types of regional environments via a hierarchical logistic regression model. •The residents’ environmental cognitive attitude and cognitive ability are influenced by environmental characteristics of their respective region.•There is a significant difference in residents’ willingness to pay for ecological consumption under different types of regional environmental characteristics.•The difference of residents’ environmental cognition accounts for the spatial heterogeneous effect of their willingness to pay for ecologi