Do Rewards Increase Tourists’ Willingness to Engage in Low-Carbon Behavior?

As rational economic beings, economic gains in behavior influence consumers. Consequently, rewards influence consumer behavior, which leads to altruism and warm traits. This motivates consumers to enhance their willingness to behave in a pro-social way. Previous studies demonstrate that rewards can positively influence the environmentally conscious consumption behavior of consumers. However, their impact on the willingness of tourists to adopt low-carbon behavior is overlooked. Promoting low-carbon behavior, incentive services are becoming increasingly prevalent in tourism. Encouraging tourists to start behaving in a low-carbon way is of particular importance for sustainable tourism. Authors have combined rewards and the low-carbon behavioral intentions of tourists based on stimulus–organism–response theory to explore the positive emotions of tourists triggered by rewards. This theory posits that positive emotions will further boost tourist willingness to engage in low-carbon behavior. Thus, we conducted three experiments to investigate three key areas, namely, the role of rewards in influencing tourists’ willingness to become involved in low-carbon behavior, the impact of rewards on the generation of positive emotions, and the impact of positive emotions with regard to the readiness to become involved low-carbon behaviors. The results indicate that rewards exert a positive effect on emotions, which influences the inclination to engage in environmentally friendly behavior. Additionally, the extent of environmental knowledge moderates the willingness to participate in such activities. This paper provides original insights into the factors influencing the willingness of tourists to participate in low-carbon practices and provides valuable managerial guidance for the sustainable development of tourism.