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The overall goal of this project is to gain deep insight of consumer preference for food product quality and explore the impacts of different methods on consumer preference estimates. Specific objectives of this projects are: <OL> <LI> Using various methods such as choice experiments, experimental auctions and contingent valuation to estimate consumer preferences for food quality attributes.<LI> Change the methodology variables in those methods to determine the effects of those variables on the estimates of consumer preferences. <LI>Verify the estimated preference by observation of consumer behavior in real world purchases. Compare elicited preferences using different methods with the true revealed preferences.
NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: With the declining proportion of food expenditure relative to household income, more knowledge about the health benefit of food, increasing awareness of food-borne disease and more concerns about the environment, consumers are increasingly demanding foods that are assured to be healthier, safer, more palatable, and more environment or animal friendly. An accurate estimate of consumer preference and accurate prediction of consumer purchase behavior based on quality attributes is the premise to know what and how to satisfy consumers? demand for food quality. Wrong estimates of consumer preferences will lead to faulty or inefficient government policy and failed market strategy, which may result in economic loss to society, the food industry, production agriculture, and taxpayers. However, accurately estimating consumer preferences is difficult. This task is hindered by the complicated relationships among food quality attributes and the lack of standard research methods to truly reveal consumer preferences for product quality. This project will investigate the interactions between different types of food product attributes and explore the divergence in consumer preferences gained from different methods. The results will provide needed information to policy makers and industry who are interested in consumer preferences as well as benefit researches using those methods to study consumer preferences.
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APPROACH: Orange juice is used as an example to describe the methods used in the project. The same method can also be applied to other products. 1) Collecting the attribute quality information available on orange juice in the current market and classified them based on different types of attributes. 2) Select one type of attribute (e.g. search attributes) to investigate consumer preferences. 3) Control the information content, payment methods (hypothetical vs. non-hypothetical); choose one approach from each of CV, CE and EA to estimate consumer evaluation of attributes (if possible, multiple approaches from each of CV, CE and EA may be selected). 4) Add another type of orange juice attribute (e.g. experience or credence) in the study, and estimate consumer preferences using the methods in step 3. 5) After a certain amount of time, the same research in step 2 and step 3 can be conducted to the same sample to estimate their preferences. 6) Estimates of consumer preferences before or after new types of information, and at different time periods can be compared to investigate the relationships between different types of attributes and the effect of time. 6) Household survey data may be used as a baseline to evaluate the estimates of consumer stated preference using CV, CE and EA.