2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts, Aug 2, 2016
The fact that survey respondents do not attend to all the attributes presented in choice experime... more The fact that survey respondents do not attend to all the attributes presented in choice experiment surveys is fast becoming a key issue in CE studies. This study proposes a new method aimed at eliciting consumers’ stated attribute non-attendance (ANA) behavior at the levels of each attribute, and compares it with the commonly used stated ANA approach, where non-attendance behavior is captured at the attribute level (i.e., not levels of the attributes). Results generally indicate that respondents do indeed ignore some of the levels of an attribute, suggesting that capturing non-attendance behavior at the attribute level would be insufficient at accurately and totally capturing stated ANA behavior. This finding implies that future choice experiment studies should take ANA into account not only at the attribute level but also at the levels of an attribute, both when asking respondents their stated ANA behavior during the survey and also in CE model specifications.
Throughout the low‐income world, agricultural producers have a motivation to slash‐and‐burn rainf... more Throughout the low‐income world, agricultural producers have a motivation to slash‐and‐burn rainforests as they cannot afford inorganic fertilizers. Farmers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), who are predominantly women, are often forced to walk long distances to cultivate more productive lands, when fertility near their villages is reduced. On their way and while working away from home, women become targets for rape. Adopting conservation agriculture (CA) could help mitigate deforestation and potentially create a safer environment for women. Limited knowledge about the benefits of CA across countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) has hindered its adoption. Taking these impediments into account, we estimate if consumers in the DRC are willing to pay (WTP) a premium for CA, using maize flour as the medium. By means of a double‐bounded dichotomous choice valuation method, 600 consumers in Bukavu, DRC, were surveyed about their willingness‐to‐pay for CA‐produced maize. Our st...
A number of self-beneficial motives can trigger pro-environmental and prosocial behavior of indiv... more A number of self-beneficial motives can trigger pro-environmental and prosocial behavior of individuals. We focus on the role of the warm glow of giving—the personal benefit people experience when doing good irrespective of the consequences—in the valuation of ethically certified food products. Our data is based on an online experimental auction with more than 800 consumers in Germany. Participants bid on tea and chocolate advertised with prosocial and pro-environmental certifications after being randomly exposed to affectively and informatively framed messages. We also measured the experienced warm glow of participants. Our main results are (1) that the experienced warm glow is only linked to a higher willingness-to-pay of older and higher income respondents; (2) that the experienced warm glow does not differ between prosocial and pro-environmental causes; and (3) that treatment effects do not differ according to the participants’ warm glow level but according to the certification ...
This study investigates for the first time how the use of different information messages (i.e., h... more This study investigates for the first time how the use of different information messages (i.e., health, sensory, and convenience benefits) about hybrid meat shapes British, Spanish, and Danish consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for such products. Hybrid meats are products whereby a proportion of the meat has been replaced by plant‐based proteins. Using a choice experiment (CE) involving hybrid burgers that vary across four attributes (i.e., ingredient, fat content, Carbon Trust label, and price), our results show that consumers are generally not yet willing to pay a premium for such new products. Furthermore, we found that consumer valuation for hybrid burgers strongly depends on the type of information provided and consumer characteristics. These findings provide useful guidelines on how information can be used in communicating the nature of the hybrid meats to the public in a cross‐country context.
Consumers' valuation of food products derived from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) have... more Consumers' valuation of food products derived from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) have played a pivotal and often constraining role in the development of biotechnology advances in agriculture. As a result, agricultural companies have started exploring new biotechnologies that do not require the genetic modification of crops. One of these emerging biotechnologies is a non-GMO RNA interference (RNAi) liquid application that could be used to control specific insect pests. When ingested by a targeted sub-species of an insect during production, RNAi blocks the expression of a vital gene, which in turn kills it. RNAi is non-toxic to humans and kills only targeted sub-species of insects, which differs from most conventional pesticides. For example, RNAi could selectively eliminate a specific sub-species of caterpillar pest, while not harming a monarch butterfly caterpillar. In contrast, conventional pesticides often kill insects indiscriminately and vary in human toxicity levels...
While a number of hypothetical bias mitigation methods have been proposed, the problem remains as... more While a number of hypothetical bias mitigation methods have been proposed, the problem remains as the literature continues to debate the effectiveness and practicality of the mitigation methods (Loomis, 2011). We propose an easy to implement methods to mitigate hypothetical bias in choice experiments. The method involve asking respondents to recall the Ten Commandments prior to willingness to pay elicitation. Our result shows that the proposed method exhibit sign of hypothetical bias mitigation.
Food values are supposed to be stable. This paper tests this assumption by comparing food values ... more Food values are supposed to be stable. This paper tests this assumption by comparing food values before and during the coronavirus-19 pandemic. While the ranking of food values remains very similar, there are some interesting differences in the relative importance that consumers attached to food values before and during the pandemic. A substantial decrease in the importance that consumers attach to food safety was observed during the pandemic, while there was a moderate increase in the importance attached to taste, nutrition, appearance, convenience and origin. The changes in food values vary across sociodemographic groups. Implications of the results are discussed.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a topic of great interest to researchers, food ma... more Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a topic of great interest to researchers, food marketers, and policymakers since the 1990s. Despite the controversies and opposition from various interest groups, the adoption of GMOs in the world has been phenomenal. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, Economic Research Service [ERS], 2017a), at least 90% of all soybeans, corn, and cotton planted in the United States are of genetically modified (GM) varieties. As shown in Table 1, global GMO crop production has increased 100-fold from the initial planting of 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 179.7 million hectares in 2015. Hence, GMO crops are now considered as the fastest adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture (ISAAA, 2016). GM soybean accounted for about half of all the biotech crop area in the world in 2015. The country growing the largest acreage of GM soybean is the United States, where the acreage has increased rapidly from 4.8 million hectar...
2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts, Aug 2, 2016
The fact that survey respondents do not attend to all the attributes presented in choice experime... more The fact that survey respondents do not attend to all the attributes presented in choice experiment surveys is fast becoming a key issue in CE studies. This study proposes a new method aimed at eliciting consumers’ stated attribute non-attendance (ANA) behavior at the levels of each attribute, and compares it with the commonly used stated ANA approach, where non-attendance behavior is captured at the attribute level (i.e., not levels of the attributes). Results generally indicate that respondents do indeed ignore some of the levels of an attribute, suggesting that capturing non-attendance behavior at the attribute level would be insufficient at accurately and totally capturing stated ANA behavior. This finding implies that future choice experiment studies should take ANA into account not only at the attribute level but also at the levels of an attribute, both when asking respondents their stated ANA behavior during the survey and also in CE model specifications.
Throughout the low‐income world, agricultural producers have a motivation to slash‐and‐burn rainf... more Throughout the low‐income world, agricultural producers have a motivation to slash‐and‐burn rainforests as they cannot afford inorganic fertilizers. Farmers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), who are predominantly women, are often forced to walk long distances to cultivate more productive lands, when fertility near their villages is reduced. On their way and while working away from home, women become targets for rape. Adopting conservation agriculture (CA) could help mitigate deforestation and potentially create a safer environment for women. Limited knowledge about the benefits of CA across countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) has hindered its adoption. Taking these impediments into account, we estimate if consumers in the DRC are willing to pay (WTP) a premium for CA, using maize flour as the medium. By means of a double‐bounded dichotomous choice valuation method, 600 consumers in Bukavu, DRC, were surveyed about their willingness‐to‐pay for CA‐produced maize. Our st...
A number of self-beneficial motives can trigger pro-environmental and prosocial behavior of indiv... more A number of self-beneficial motives can trigger pro-environmental and prosocial behavior of individuals. We focus on the role of the warm glow of giving—the personal benefit people experience when doing good irrespective of the consequences—in the valuation of ethically certified food products. Our data is based on an online experimental auction with more than 800 consumers in Germany. Participants bid on tea and chocolate advertised with prosocial and pro-environmental certifications after being randomly exposed to affectively and informatively framed messages. We also measured the experienced warm glow of participants. Our main results are (1) that the experienced warm glow is only linked to a higher willingness-to-pay of older and higher income respondents; (2) that the experienced warm glow does not differ between prosocial and pro-environmental causes; and (3) that treatment effects do not differ according to the participants’ warm glow level but according to the certification ...
This study investigates for the first time how the use of different information messages (i.e., h... more This study investigates for the first time how the use of different information messages (i.e., health, sensory, and convenience benefits) about hybrid meat shapes British, Spanish, and Danish consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for such products. Hybrid meats are products whereby a proportion of the meat has been replaced by plant‐based proteins. Using a choice experiment (CE) involving hybrid burgers that vary across four attributes (i.e., ingredient, fat content, Carbon Trust label, and price), our results show that consumers are generally not yet willing to pay a premium for such new products. Furthermore, we found that consumer valuation for hybrid burgers strongly depends on the type of information provided and consumer characteristics. These findings provide useful guidelines on how information can be used in communicating the nature of the hybrid meats to the public in a cross‐country context.
Consumers' valuation of food products derived from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) have... more Consumers' valuation of food products derived from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) have played a pivotal and often constraining role in the development of biotechnology advances in agriculture. As a result, agricultural companies have started exploring new biotechnologies that do not require the genetic modification of crops. One of these emerging biotechnologies is a non-GMO RNA interference (RNAi) liquid application that could be used to control specific insect pests. When ingested by a targeted sub-species of an insect during production, RNAi blocks the expression of a vital gene, which in turn kills it. RNAi is non-toxic to humans and kills only targeted sub-species of insects, which differs from most conventional pesticides. For example, RNAi could selectively eliminate a specific sub-species of caterpillar pest, while not harming a monarch butterfly caterpillar. In contrast, conventional pesticides often kill insects indiscriminately and vary in human toxicity levels...
While a number of hypothetical bias mitigation methods have been proposed, the problem remains as... more While a number of hypothetical bias mitigation methods have been proposed, the problem remains as the literature continues to debate the effectiveness and practicality of the mitigation methods (Loomis, 2011). We propose an easy to implement methods to mitigate hypothetical bias in choice experiments. The method involve asking respondents to recall the Ten Commandments prior to willingness to pay elicitation. Our result shows that the proposed method exhibit sign of hypothetical bias mitigation.
Food values are supposed to be stable. This paper tests this assumption by comparing food values ... more Food values are supposed to be stable. This paper tests this assumption by comparing food values before and during the coronavirus-19 pandemic. While the ranking of food values remains very similar, there are some interesting differences in the relative importance that consumers attached to food values before and during the pandemic. A substantial decrease in the importance that consumers attach to food safety was observed during the pandemic, while there was a moderate increase in the importance attached to taste, nutrition, appearance, convenience and origin. The changes in food values vary across sociodemographic groups. Implications of the results are discussed.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a topic of great interest to researchers, food ma... more Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a topic of great interest to researchers, food marketers, and policymakers since the 1990s. Despite the controversies and opposition from various interest groups, the adoption of GMOs in the world has been phenomenal. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, Economic Research Service [ERS], 2017a), at least 90% of all soybeans, corn, and cotton planted in the United States are of genetically modified (GM) varieties. As shown in Table 1, global GMO crop production has increased 100-fold from the initial planting of 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 179.7 million hectares in 2015. Hence, GMO crops are now considered as the fastest adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture (ISAAA, 2016). GM soybean accounted for about half of all the biotech crop area in the world in 2015. The country growing the largest acreage of GM soybean is the United States, where the acreage has increased rapidly from 4.8 million hectar...
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Papers by Rodolfo Nayga