The Effect of Air Pollution on Consumer Decision-making Behavior: A Literature Review

Purpose/Significance In recent years, consumer behavior studies have shown that weather and air quality have a significant impact on consumer purchase behavior, so it is necessary to understand the different ways and causes of individual consumers’ responses to weather conditions. However, the existing research results are scattered in different disciplines, and there is a lack of summary of the research topics. By systematically reviewing the effects of air pollution on consumer decision-making, it is possible to fully understand how macro-level air pollution factors alter consumer behavior at the micro-level, so as to help enterprise managers develop targeted marketing management strategies to avoid or reduce the impact of air quality on consumer decision-making behavior. Design/Methodology Based on the core keyword search in the main academic literature database and on search engine websites, the effects of air pollution on consumer decision-making behavior were systematically reviewed and collated. Specifically, on the basis of the S-O-R model in the field of environmental psychology, the effects of air pollution on consumer decision-making behavior are divided into several main stages: physical and mental changes before consumption decision-making process, decision behavior changes during the consumption decision-making process and consumption experience and evaluation behavior changes after consumption decision-making process based on the process perspective. Conclusions/Findings Through the establishment and analysis of the theme structure of the impact of air pollution, the results show that the impact of air pollution on consumers is very extensive, from health risk to emotional change, from daily habits to individual and group consumption behavior change.