The Effect of Elevation on Tourists’ Perceived Co-Created Value: A Food Waste Reduction Perspective

Emotions are critical in value co-creation, particularly for sustainable practices. Elevation, a selftranscendent emotion generated when witnessing acts of kindness, remains underexplored in tourism and food waste research. In particular, this paper adopts a perceived co-created value perspective, which is defined as the appraisal of the meaningfulness of co-created effort. This research adopts the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions to examine how feeling elevated affects tourists' perceived co-created value from their participation in food waste reduction practices at destinations. Three experimental studies reveal that feeling elevated increases perceived co-created value through the parallel mediations of enhanced self-other connectedness and increased optimistic view of others. Additionally, we investigate two moderators that can affect the activation and the consequences of the broaden-and-build process: other destination actors' perceived altruism and problem severity at the destination. Results show that perceived altruism moderates the mediation effect of optimistic view of others on tourists'perceived co-created value. However, the effect of elevation on tourists' perceived co-created value remains robust irrespective of problem severity (i.e., food scarcity).