Changes in Awareness of Sustainability for Italian Stakeholders: Evidences from 2022 to 2023 Surveys

The concept of sustainability has been widely discussed as one of the most cited and interesting trend topics, offering numerous definitions and best practices for its understanding. In this context, the perception of sustainability among the population and companies is an aspect that is often overlooked. In this work, this issue has been analysed using results from a survey in which a sample of 2,000 respondents answered questions about the perception of sustainability for Italian companies. The primary objective of this work is to evaluate the level of understanding and perception of the role companies play in this field. This objective was achieved by asking the population how much they are informed about sustainability and the SDGs, as well as how much they are willing to pay to choose a sustainable company over a non-sustainable one. The respondent segments were obtained using decision trees. The decisional rule used to obtain the nodes was the CHAID (Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection) method. Trees are connected acyclic graphs fundamental to creating data structures, classification tools, decision theories, and prediction models. Each node can be thought of as a cluster. Tree prediction models incorporate two key components: the predictor and predicted variables, which label the nodes and branches.