Effects of media headlines on consumer preferences for food safety, quality and environmental attributes

David Ortega, H. Holly Wang and Nicole Widmar

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2015, vol. 59, issue 3

Abstract: In recent years, Asia has emerged as an important supplier of food to Western countries. In this study, we focus on shrimp, a major aquaculture commodity, to evaluate consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for enhanced food safety, use of antibiotics and eco-friendly practices used in producing shrimp in the presence of country-of-origin labelling. Specifically, this research assesses the effects of news headlines regarding product safety, as information shocks on U.S. consumer demand. Consumers were found to have a mean willingness-to-pay of $7.81 per pound of shrimp with an enhanced safety characteristic from the United States, $0.94 for the same type of shrimp from China and $2.43 for similar shrimp from Thailand. Consumers had a WTP for the absence of antibiotics in the production of U.S. shrimp of $7.31 and were only willing to pay for an eco-friendly attribute on domestically produced shrimp. Media headlines were found to have a statistically significant effect on consumer preferences and WTP for product characteristics. Food policy and international agribusiness implications of our findings are discussed.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/283213/files/ajar12097.pdf (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:ags:aareaj:283213

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.283213

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().