Preferences for food safety and animal welfare – a choice experiment study comparing organic and conventional consumers

Food quality attributes such as food safety and animal welfare are increasingly influencing consumers’ choices of food products. These attributes are not readily traded in the markets. Hence, stated pref-erence methods have proven to be valuable tools for eliciting preferences for such non-traded attributes. A discrete choice experiment is employed, and the re-sults indicate that consumers in general are willing to pay a premium for campylobacter-free chicken and for improved animal welfare; and they are willing to pay an additional premium for a product containing both attributes. Further, we find that organic consumers have a higher willingness to pay for animal welfare than other consumers, but they are not willing to pay more than conventional consumers when it comes to their willingness to pay for avoiding campylobacter

Attending to the reasons for attribute non-attendance in Choice Experiments

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that preferences are indeed elicited in these cases, and we show how using a scaling approach can appropriately weight these observations in the econometric model. Finally, we find that some respondents ignore attributes for protest-like reasons which essentially convey no information about preferences. We suggest that using the standard approach combined with weighting procedures and recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on the specific reasons for non-attendance could be more appropriate than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account.choice experiment, attribute non-attendance, passive bounded rationality, rationally adaptive behaviour, error component logit model

Identifying latent interest-groups: An analysis of heterogeneous preferences for income-redistribution

The German government is strongly involved in redistributing income. For various reasons such as the capacity to govern and social stability this makes a good un-derstanding of the citizens’ respective preferences and their informal coalitions ex-tremely important. The identification of such interest groups is non-trivial as they may be determined by latent characteristics and preferences for redistribution are difficult to measure. The aim of this study is to identify latent interest-groups in the context of preferences for redistribution adopting an inductive approach. The data for the estimation of the WTP values is generated by a DCE, based on a rep-resentative sample of 1,538 German individuals. To identify the latent interest-groups we investigate to which extent respondents can be divided into groups us-ing Latent Class Models thereby accounting for both observable and unobservable heterogeneity within the society. Based on the econometric analysis we can identi-fy six social interest groups that differ regarding their preferences for redistribu-tion and their composition. Both, their preferences regarding the overall budget for redistribution and their preferences regarding the different recipient groups as well as the socio-demographic determinants for group membership are plausible and match well with the current political situation in Germany