Abstract/Summary

Rewards are effective promotional tools for promoting desirable behaviors, strengthening engagement, and incentivizing pro-environmental actions. Integrating expectancy theory and the appraisal tendency framework, this research investigated the interplay of reward certainty and incidental emotions on pro-environmental behaviors. While previous research primarily focused on integral emotions directly linked to the consumption context, this study makes a unique contribution by analyzing the impact of incidental emotions, which are developed from a separate and unconnected situation, but still influence customer choices. The three experimental studies provided convergent empirical evidence that certain rewards significantly strengthen individuals’ outcome expectancy and pro-environmental intentions, particularly when incidental fear (compared with hope) is induced. Theoretically, this research bridged the gaps in prior research by examining the interaction of reward certainty and incidental emotions. Practically, businesses and policymakers are suggested to leverage certain rewards and fear-inducing stimuli to promote sustainable behaviors effectively.