Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives and the Vote-Buy Gap

Vukina Tomislav (), Oh Sohae Eve () and Moschini GianCarlo ()
Additional contact information
Vukina Tomislav: Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
Oh Sohae Eve: Department of Dental Medicine, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea
Moschini GianCarlo: Department of Economics and Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, 2025, vol. 23, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: We provide empirical evidence to explain the apparent discrepancy between consumption choices and voting outcomes for a recent high-profile animal welfare case: California’s ban of eggs produced with caged hens. The model juxtaposes the private good aspect of buying decisions with the public good aspect of voting, and yields testable propositions for the vote-buy gap. These implications are evaluated in a revealed-preferences setting using a novel combination of voting and egg-purchase data. Results show that the vote-buy gap depends on the egg price differential, and the distribution of consumers’ heterogeneous preference for animal welfare issues.

Keywords: animal welfare; ballot initiatives; consumer heterogeneity; differentiated products; public goods; vote-buy gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D72 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jafio-2024-0053 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:bjafio:v:23:y:2025:i:1:p:1-15:n:1004

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyte ... urnal/key/jafio/html

DOI: 10.1515/jafio-2024-0053

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization is currently edited by Azzeddine Azzam

More articles in Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().