Exploring green electricity certificate purchasing behavior via a laboratory experiment

The current market activity of China's green electricity certificates (GECs) is less than 10 %. How to promote the purchase of GECs needs to be studied. Based on induced value theory, laboratory experiments were constructed to explore the policy mechanisms and characteristics that promote individual GEC purchasing behavior. Three types of social networks are considered, which have different information display and communication mechanisms. Based on the internal effectiveness of sequential experiments, 150 participants were recruited to jointly complete 30 sets of “wind tunnel” experiments. The findings indicate that star-shaped network mechanisms have limited effectiveness in promoting individual GEC purchasing behavior, while small-scale chain network mechanisms including social relationships have better intervention effects, followed by the effects of global network mechanisms. In addition, this study also shows the impact of environmental concerns on individual GEC purchasing behavior. The research results demonstrate the feasibility of coordinating the environment, society, and the economy through low-cost wind tunnel experiments with some boosting mechanisms, which has important reference value for promoting non-economic environmental policies such as GECs. The major contribution of this study is to analyze the influence of various social networks on individual GEC purchasing behavior based on the method of experimental economics, which was rarely discussed in the previous literature.