The increasingly serious problem of consumers returning goods on e-commerce platforms has brought high costs to the Internet economy, carbon pollution to the environment, and waste of social resources. E-commerce platforms can provide useful information to assist consumers to make rational decisions, but they are often filled with useless, repetitive, and even false excessive information, which will lead to information overload and impulsive decision-making of consumers. Most of the previous literature focuses on reverse logistics, return policy, and consumer behavior tendency, etc. From the perspective of consumers’ perception of information displayed on e-commerce platforms, there are few research endeavors on the formation mechanism of perceived information overload on consumers’ return intention. Taking perceived information overload as an independent variable and consumers’ perceived environmental effectiveness as a moderation variable, this study constructs a chain mediation model that affects consumers’ online return intention. Based on the analysis of the mediating effects of impulsive buying behavior and cognitive dissonance, this study explored the moderating mechanism of consumers’ perceived environmental effectiveness on the chain mediation model. The results show that perceived information overload has a positive influence on online return intention through impulsive buying behavior, and perceived information overload has a positive influence on online return intention through cognitive dissonance. Perceived information overload also positively affects cognitive dissonance through impulsive buying behavior and thus has a significant positive chain mediating effect on consumers’ online return intention. More importantly, this research shows that consumers’ perceived environmental effectiveness can significantly moderate the chain mediation path by reducing the positive effect of the cognitive dissonance on online return intention. On this basis, this study put forward the corresponding managerial implications from the perspectives of consumers and e-commerce platforms.

The remanufacturing industry can realize sustainability by saving resources and protecting the environment. The remanufactured products have a high similarity with the new products, and how they affect consumers’ evaluation of the new products is an important issue. This paper discusses the relationship between the similarity of remanufactured products and consumers’ willingness to purchase new products, with a mediating effect of perceived quality and a moderating effect of brand reputation. The empirical analysis based on 498 valid samples shows our conclusions below. First, the similarity of remanufactured products has a significant negative impact on the purchase intention of new products. Second, the perceived quality of new products plays a partial mediating role between similarity and purchase intention. Third, brand reputation negatively moderates the relationship between the similarity of remanufactured products and the perceived quality of new products. Furthermore, brand reputation also moderates the mediating effect of the similarity of remanufactured products on the purchase intention of new products through the perceived quality of new products. This paper suggests a new perspective for the research of remanufactured products and provides an important reference for the healthy and sustainable development of recycling and remanufacturing industry.

With global aging trends and prosperity in the medicine market, the number of unused or expired household unused or expired medicines is increasing. Medicines which are discarded improperly result in serious pollution. From the perspective of behavioral science, the main contribution of this paper is the construction of a chain mediation model to analyze the influence mechanism between consequences awareness of the public environment and proper return behavior of unused or expired medicines. The model explores the moderating effect of personal health awareness with through observation of to the mediating effect of personal norms and return intention. Using a sample size of 366 residents from China, the proposed hypotheses are empirically tested. The results show: firstly, the direct effect of residents’ consequences awareness of public environmental awareness on the proper medicine return behavior is not significant; secondly, return intention plays a mediating role in the positive effect of consequences awareness of the public environment on proper return behavior; thirdly, personal norms and return intention play a chain mediating role in the positive impact of consequences awareness of the public environment on proper return behavior; and lastly, personal health awareness moderates the chain mediation path by strengthening the positive effect of return intention on proper return behavior.