Consumers preferences for bio-based products and market analysis

Elsa Mirta M. Rodríguez

Nülan. Deposited Documents from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Centro de Documentación

Abstract: Many consumers seek food safety and are willing to pay higher prices for "healthy or nutritive products" since they increase their utility level, reducing, at the same time, health risks. However, they are unable to ascertain food safety before purchase, being this the most important constraint to economic efficiency in the production and marketing of food safety. Most food markets do not count on complete information about food quality for consumers. As a consequence, quality has become a crucial concept in the new approaches of the Demand Theory (Lancaster, 1966); and so, Antle (1999) started to incorporate it in food demand functions as an additional variable. Quality is a wide and subjective notion that refers to different kinds of attributes that could either be verified by consumers or not, before or after purchasing food, e.g. colour, temperature, taste, nutritious facts, applied processes -such as irradiation or genetic manipulation- and added substances during the productive processes. Quality uncertainty has played a key role in the literature about safety and products liability and several articles have dealt with quality and uncertainty, the most relevant of which is that by Akerlof (1970), which demonstrates that when purchasing food, consumers make their choices by comparing prices and qualities. Such choices are definitely conditioned by the uncertainty they perceive in relation to the different qualities offered by the markets and by the information available to them. The purpose of this socio-economic research is to contribute to the development of bio-based products markets at international and domestic level and to improve the information looking forward 1. Mobilizing policy and institutional changes aimed at promoting and facilitating public and private decision-making, 2. Evaluation of specific resource alternatives/tecnologies/regulation to the especific bioeconomic product and market development.

Keywords: Preferencias del Consumidor; Disposición a Pagar; Alimentos Diferenciados (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://nulan.mdp.edu.ar/id/eprint/2556/1/rodriguez.2011.pdf accepted (application/pdf)

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:nmp:nuland:2556

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Nülan. Deposited Documents from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Centro de Documentación Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cristian Merlino S. ().