An empirical study on acceptability of green apparel: An application of bayesian probabilistic network

Cotton has been used for producing garments for more than thousands of years. India is one of the three largest producers of cotton in the world. Of late there is a deep contradiction in the clothing industry between the need to meet consumer needs expeditiously and to meet the same in a more sustainable. This paper aims to understand the main factors affecting decision making of Indian consumers while opting for apparels made of Green Cotton, and attempts to develop a Bayesian Probability Network to model on the causal variables extracted from the first phase and to calculate updated probabilities of all the causal factors and as such gives us information on likely values of these causal opinion/perception variables that may generate desired Consumer acceptability of green apparels. The significance of this paper is in framing a probable model for the marketers which may be utilised to construct some kind of policy intervention or conjecture. This means if the marketer wants medium consumer acceptability of green products then it must be ensured that the causal variables take on appropriate values or if marketer wants high consumer acceptability of green products then it must be ensured that the causal variables similarly take on appropriate values.