Designing Personal Carbon Accounts for Low-Carbon Consumption: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment in Southwest China

Personal carbon accounts translate everyday low-carbon actions into records, feedback, and rewards, yet there is limited evidence on how users value specific design features. This study examines young adults’ preferences for five attributes of personal carbon accounts: tangible welfare incentives, non-material incentives, carbon-reduction rankings, privacy protection, and overall time cost. A discrete choice experiment was conducted with 623 valid respondents in the Sichuan-Chongqing region, and preferences were estimated using conditional logit, mixed logit, and latent class models. Product discounts and ranking feedback increased the relative attractiveness of an account scheme, whereas higher time costs reduced it. Financial credit benefits, personal honorary titles, and public-welfare contributions were less attractive than their respective baseline levels. Blockchain-labeled protection had no significant average advantage over standard anonymization, although responses to this label varied across respondents and latent classes. Preference heterogeneity was concentrated mainly in the valuation of welfare and non-material incentives. These findings suggest that youth-oriented personal carbon accounts should offer benefits that are easy to understand and redeem, provide visible but low-burden feedback, and explain data-protection arrangements in concrete terms.