Elsevier

Building and Environment

Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2010, Pages 2553-2561
Building and Environment

A choice experiment to estimate the effect of green experience on preferences and willingness-to-pay for green building attributes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2010.05.017Get rights and content

Abstract

As the number and complexities of green building developments are mainly driven by market demands, understanding of end-user behaviors towards their development eventually should play a crucial role on determining their successes. However, very few studies have been attempted to explore end-user behaviors towards green building development. This study successfully applied discrete choice experiments to reveal whether residents with green experience will have different preference and willingness-to-pay values for enhancements on various aspects of environmental performance in green buildings. Generally, both green and conventional residents had strong preferences and were willing to pay more for improving various aspects of environmental performance in green residential developments. They are found to be willing to pay more for energy conservation, than indoor air quality improvement, noise level reduction, landscape area enlargement, or water conservation. No significant differences are found in the preferences between green and conventional residents for energy conservation, indoor air quality improvement, indoor noise reduction, or water conservation, However, green residents were found to be willing to pay significantly less than the conventional residents for enlarging the landscape area within a residential development, despite it was perceived by green residents as one of the major elements that differentiate a green from a conventional development.

Introduction

Buildings have long been recognized as one of the most important man-made built structures imposing significant impacts on both our local and global environments. Buildings accounted for more than 20–40% of energy consumption in developed countries [1], and 13.6% of all the potable water consumption in the US [2]. Buildings also consume a considerable proportion of raw materials globally and produce a significant amount of wastes during their construction and demolition processes. For instance, the United States alone consumed 40% of raw materials uses globally [3]. The wastes generated by building construction and demolition processes accounted for half of the total amount of municipal solid waste generated in the same year [4].

Not surprisingly, buildings have become one of major focuses of attention in the recent age of sustainability [5]. Early efforts generally focused on single issues such as energy efficiency and conservation of natural resources in the course of striving for environmental excellence. Many innovative engineering systems have been continuously evolved for increasing their efficiencies, effectiveness and suitability for building application [6], [7], [8]. In combating global warming, renewable systems have continuously been developed as a great leap in migrating towards carbon-free or zero-emission buildings [9]. Endeavors have also been initiated in developing new environmental-friendly building materials, like thin film photovoltaic materials, phase change materials and pulverized fuel ashes, to reduce the energy and resources impacts on the environment [10], [11]. On the other hand, revolutionary changes in concepts for design, procurement, and management processes have also been advocated for bringing a greater reduction in overall environmental impact in buildings [12].

Nonetheless, an integrated effort in putting forward a new breed of green buildings did not emerge until the first launching of the Building Environmental Assessment Scheme in the UK in 1992 [13]. Since then, a vast number of building eco-labeling or environment assessment schemes have flourished worldwide for help defining and assessing the environmental performance of buildings [14], [15], [16], [17]. Different schemes place different emphasis on different aspects of environmental performance and are under continuous updating and refinement in both their scopes and details. Despite so, a majority of them shared a common objective of stimulating the market demands while improved environmental performance by providing consumers with an extra reference for making rental and/or purchase decisions [18]. As the number and complexities of green building developments are mainly driven by market demands, understanding of end-user behaviors towards their development eventually should play a crucial role on determining their successes. However, very few studies have been attempted to explore end-user behaviors towards green building developments. Some did unveil the environmental behaviors and satisfaction of their green building inhabitants, but unfortunately evidences reported so far are not quite favorable towards the performance of green developments. Green residential developments were found not able to attract environmentally savvy homeowners [19]. No significant difference was perceived in the indoor environmental quality between a green and a conventional office building [20] despite occupants in the green building tended to tolerate deficiencies more than they did with conventional buildings [21]. The unfavorable outcomes are partly due to unaddressed or even unexplored end-users’ preferences for green residential developments. Accordingly, this study is intended to bridge this gap by exploring end-user preferences and their willingness-to-pay for green residential developments. Given that some earlier studies in consumer market and health care areas suggest experiences may change individual preferences [22], [23], [24], it is worthwhile to examine whether individuals’ experiences with green buildings will moderate their perceptions of, and their preferences and willingness-to-pay for enhancements to different aspects of environmental performance. This finding should be of paramount interest as more green developments are anticipated to be emerged in eminent future.

Section snippets

Methodology

Questionnaire surveys were employed as a major instrument for eliciting participants’ preferences for various aspects of enhanced environmental performance that are associated with green residential developments. Our survey instrument comprised three major sections. The first section contained questions which were specially targeted at participants currently living in green developments so as to reveal their levels of awareness and understandings on green developments. The second section

Results

Prior to a full-scale survey, a trial run was conducted in November 2007 with an objective to remove any ambiguities on the content of the questionnaire design and the method of delivering the questionnaire survey. Full-scale surveys were subsequently conducted between July 2007 and August 2008. In total, 2256 individuals were approached with 480 interviews being successfully administered, giving an average response rate of 21%. This is considered to be acceptable given the complexity of choice

Discussions and conclusions

This paper successfully applied discrete choice experiments for revealing the preferences and deriving the willingness-to-pay estimates for various aspects of environmental performance of a green residential development. In recognizing that individuals generally have higher preferences for the aspects of environmental performance that can derive benefit gains for themselves than for the environment, we have only included in our study those aspects which can provide potential benefit gains for

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for their financial support through the Intra-faculty Central Allocation Grant No. GY-G17.

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