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Food Beliefs: Elicitation, Estimation and Implications for Labeling Policy
Author(s) -
Costanigro Marco,
Deselnicu Oana,
Kroll Stephan
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.157
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1477-9552
pISSN - 0021-857X
DOI - 10.1111/1477-9552.12085
Subject(s) - quality (philosophy) , product (mathematics) , ranking (information retrieval) , sort , marketing , estimation , food products , econometrics , computer science , psychology , economics , business , mathematics , food science , machine learning , information retrieval , philosophy , chemistry , geometry , management , epistemology
Abstract We present a model in which consumers use product attributes (or labels) and their own beliefs to form expectations about the quality of a product. We use best–worst scaling to elicit beliefs, and study how information may influence these beliefs. In our ranking experiments, participants sort different milk products according to (perceived) nutritional or environmental quality, and we use the resulting choice data to recover beliefs econometrically. In a nutritional quality experiment, we measure how food labels (i.e. front‐of‐package, back‐of‐package and ratio of recommended to restricted nutrients) alter consumers’ beliefs, finding that truthful attribute information may sometimes mislead consumers. The discussion explains how similar experiments could be used to distinguish informative labels from marketing messages.