Investigating sustainable consumer preferences for remanufactured electronic products

Consumers have been increasingly interested in purchasing remanufactured electronic products due to their lower prices and concerns in environmental issues. Remanufactured products are normally developed by col-lecting and recovering previously sold new products. Then, they are usually labelled as remanufactured and/or refurbished products and sold at lower prices with reduced environmental and social impacts. However, con-sumer behavior on purchasing remanufactured electronic products has not been well investigated with com-parison to their associated brand-new products from a sustainability perspective. This research focuses on ex-amining consumer preferences on remanufactured electronic products considering economic, environmental and social attributes. The proposed approach mainly involves determining product sustainability attributes and their levels, conjoint analysis, and discrete choice analysis. Conjoint analysis is used to determine part-worth utilities of sustainability attributes; and discrete choice analysis is conducted to examine market shares of re -manufactured electronic products with various attribute levels. The results of conjoint analysis show that 'quality level' and 'safety and health impact' were considered as the most important attributes, followed by 'product price,' while purchasing remanufactured electronic products. In addition, the market share of a highly sus-tainable remanufactured product, the remanufactured product with improved sustainable attributes, was pre-dicted four times more than that of the base remanufactured product which has the same attribute levels with its corresponding new product.