The effect of information about health hazards on demand for frequently purchased commodities

Amir Heiman and Oded Lowengart

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2008, vol. 25, issue 4, 310-318

Abstract: Prior studies have shown that information about health hazards may shift demand downward, because consumers devaluate the affected product attribute, while overlooking the effect of such information on attribute importance weights, implicitly considering them to be stable. This study shows that information about health hazards may affect both the perception of attributes and their importance weights. Using data from a field experiment and econometric analysis, we identify conditions that lead to cross-attribute effects (information on health hazards regarding the affected attribute changes the importance weight of other attributes), and to cross-category effects (information on health hazards regarding the affected product changes the importance weights of substitute products' attributes). These insights might help policy makers in designing public campaigns aimed at changing unhealthy diets. For example, obesity has become a major problem in the developed world. However, the public campaigns targeted to obesity highlight the relationship between fat-laden food and health hazards. Our results hint that such campaigns may at the same time increase the importance weight of the taste attribute and therefore become less effective.

Keywords: Information; Health hazard; Risk; Demand; Importance weight; Multi-attribute (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811608000633
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ijrema:v:25:y:2008:i:4:p:310-318

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2008.07.002

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().