成本信号理论暗示绿色产品的价格调整会产生两个双刃效应,即需求规律的价格效应和顾客间社会影响的口碑效应,对绿色产品的扩散产生影响。令人遗憾的是,以往有关绿色营销的文献忽略了可能影响扩散的口碑效应与被广泛认可的价格效应相反。通过基于Agent的建模,本研究揭示了口碑效应的显著性,口碑效应能够在很大程度上阻碍或刺激口碑的传播,进而影响口碑传播的未来阶段的采纳。本研究还发现,消费者构成的社会网络结构在绿色产品扩散中可能发挥非平凡的作用,双刃效应的影响可能取决于网络结构。这种影响的价态可能会通过扩散逐渐展开的阶段转向相反。

Costly signaling theory implies that price adjustment of green products will result in two double-edged effects, the price effect due to the law of demand and the word-of-mouth effect due to social influence among customers, on the diffusion of green products. Previous literature on green marketing, unfortunately, neglected the word-of-mouth effect that could affect the diffusion in an opposite direction to that of the widely recognized price effect. By employing agent-based modeling, this study exhibited the salience of the word-of-mouth effect, which could substantially hinder or stimulate the volume of Word-of-mouth and then affect adoption in future periods of the diffusion. This study also finds that the structures of social networks consisting of consumers may play nontrivial roles in the diffusion of green products, and the impact of the double-edged effects might be contingent on the network structures. The valence of such impact might switch to the opposite through the gradually unfolding stages of the diffusion.