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The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon

By Davide Proserpio, Ali Goli, Tyler Mangini, Ken Lau, Daniela Yu
2025
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In 2020, Amazon launched the Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) program to make it easy for customers to discover and shop for products with sustainability certifications. In this paper, we measure the causal impact of products qualifying for CPF on consumer purchase behavior. Using a dataset of about 45,000 products spanning three categories, and a Differencein-Differences identification strategy, we show that joining CPF leads to a 13.3% increase in Gross Merchandise Sales, 12.5% increase in sales, and 4.4% increase in shipped units in the next 12 weeks after adoption. These results are robust to different estimators, two identification strategies, longer time windows (24 and 48 weeks), and controlling for price, promotions, ad spend, ratings and reviews, and search rank. Importantly, we show that not accounting for these controls inflates estimates by 19-27%. These differences highlight the importance of controlling for concurrent marketing efforts when evaluating sustainability programs, as sellers often increase support for certified products. We conclude the paper by showing that products with low visibility as measured by product page views, and consumable products benefit the most from the program.
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