Perceptions that organic foods are higher quality and more environmentally friendly drive shoppers\u2019 decisions to buy to a greater extent than animal welfare concerns, despite their stated good intentions.<\/p>\n
Research by\u00a0Dr Adelina Gschwandtner<\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0School of Economics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Professor Michael Burton<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0University of Western Australia<\/a>, analysed\u00a0demand\u00a0among UK consumers for\u00a0organic products, including chicken, meat and carrots.<\/p>\n The study used a survey to assess shoppers\u2019\u00a0willingness to pay extra\u00a0for product features including \u2018organic\u2019, \u2018quality\u2019, \u2018chemical-free\u2019 and \u2018animal welfare friendly\u2019.<\/p>\n The results showed that\u00a020-30%\u00a0of shoppers were happy to\u00a0pay a higher price\u00a0for the feature \u2018organic\u2019, but consumers were sometimes willing to pay even more for other features such as\u00a0\u2018quality\u2019,\u00a0\u2018environmentally friendly\u2019\u00a0and\u00a0\u2018low chemical usage\u2019. Concerns about\u00a0animal welfare\u00a0and the offer of longer expiry dates did not have the same impact on their willingness to pay more.<\/p>\n Previous research carried out by Dr Gschwandtner revealed a\u00a0gap between what people claim they want to pay for these products and what they really pay\u00a0\u2013 a \u2018hypothetical bias\u2019. To minimise the impact of this bias, the latest research used two different methods:\u00a0\u2018Cheap Talk\u2019\u00a0and\u00a0\u2018Honesty Priming\u2019. \u2018Cheap Talk\u2019 involves telling shoppers who take part in the survey that people tend to overstate their true willingness to pay when related to organic products. When consumers are informed about this overstatement, its effect tends to be reduced or eliminated.<\/p>\n \u2018Honesty Priming\u2019 influences shoppers to answer more\u00a0truthfully\u00a0by first getting them to complete a number of incomplete statements, choosing missing words from a set of \u2018true\u2019 (correct) words and a set of \u2018untrue\u2019 (incorrect) words.<\/p>\n Dr Gschwandtner said: \u2018We know from our previous studies that\u00a0shoppers\u2019 often overstate their willingness to pay more\u00a0for certain products when asked in a straight-forward survey. The techniques we used to tackle this type of hypothetical bias were shown in our research to have a significant impact.<\/p>\n \u2018In some cases, the shoppers\u2019 willingness to pay\u00a0dropped by 46%\u00a0when using methods to reduce hypothetical bias. The results reiterate the need to correct for hypothetical bias when using surveys.\u2019<\/p>\n The paper, entitled\u00a0\u2018Comparing treatments to reduce Hypothetical Bias in Choice Experiments regarding Organic Food\u2019, is forthcoming in the\u00a0European Review of Agricultural Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Article by Michelle Ulyatt on the University of Kent website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Perceptions that organic foods are higher quality and more environmentally friendly drive shoppers\u2019 decisions to buy to a greater extent than animal welfare concerns, despite … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37654,"featured_media":1840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[94132,14,94130,70],"tags":[70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1908,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions\/1908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}