Menu-Dependent Food Choices and Food Waste

Hongxing Liu, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres and Danyi Qi
Additional contact information
Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres: Department of Economics, Lafayette College
Danyi Qi: Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, Louisiana State University

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: We use a combination of randomized field experiments and online surveys to test how the menu design affects food choices and food waste. In our field experiment, participants face one of two menus a narrow menu that only displays a small portion of food, or a broad menu that also contains bigger portions. While all options are equally available in both menus, they differ in how easy and fast the different choices can be made. Our results show that, compared to the broad menu, participants in the narrow menu ordered smaller portions of food. Importantly, food intake was similar across conditions, leading to significant food waste reduction under the narrow menu. Our online survey suggest that these results are consistent with a combination of anchoring and menu-dependent self-control theories. We discuss the implication of our results to menu design in real world settings.

Keywords: food waste; food choice; menu design; nudge; anchoring; self-control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cbe, nep-dcm and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/332/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:20-37

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().