Willingness-To-Pay vs Actual Behavior: Sustainable Procurement at Festivals

Sales and purchases of socially and environmentally responsible festival clothing are a way for festival attendees to engage in ethical consumption and for event organizers to undertake sustainable procurement. Although there have been a number of studies examining willingness-to-pay (WTP), few of them examine this in a festival setting, and there is a gap in existing research regarding the determination of actual behavior. The goal of this study is therefore to explore participants’ willingness-to-pay for apparel based on more external motivations (visible environmental messages) and then ascertain whether this behavior was actually replicated in a natural field setting. This study first collected surveys from 427 festival-goers in 2015, then used a natural field experiment in 2016 to investigate whether attendees at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Ontario, Canada, would actually be prepared to pay a premium for ethical festival T-shirts over a conventional alternative. The findings reveal that attendees not only showed a willingness-to-pay but they also did actually pay a premium for such T-shirts.