Purchase Intention for Crowd-funded Milk Products with Integrated Photovoltaic Water Pumping Systems in China

In comparison with current financing mechanisms for renewable energy systems, crowd-funding financing mechanism offers a new potential source of financing with recent use of social media. Crowd-funding financing mechanism can also increases the social supports for renewable energy systems as users and investors turn to be more actively engaged in energy systems. As a new potential source of financing, crowd-funding mechanism has different forms, including donation, lending, equity and product reward approaches. In this paper, discrete choice model was used to explore whether crowd-funding financing with a novel sociotechnical product reward practice, has the attractions for potential customers to pay for a more sustainable milk product with distributed photovoltaic (PV) system. We empirically investigated the reward-base crowd funding with the specific integrated photovoltaic water pumping (PVWP) system in dairy milk production in China. 48 in-depth interviews were adopted for qualitative analysis of determinants of customer milk purchase decision. The ordered probit regression was employed with 357 online surveys to systematically estimate the purchase intention for the online-crowd-funding sustainable milk. Customer behaviours, environmental consciousness, and the individual socio-demographic factors were tested as potential explanatory variables. In the survey and depth interview samples, we found interviewees as potential customers showed strong purchase intentions to the crowd funding dairy milk for noticing milk quality and nutritious improvement, emission reduction and environmental benefits by the integrated PVWP system. In our findings of the regression results, the females, customers with young children or planning to have children were found with higher willing to purchase than other customers for crowd funding the sustainable dairy milk. The familiarity and popularity with online shopping and pre-sale purchase in China made customers more open and active towards pre-pay and crowd-funding mechanism.