Measuring Willingness to Pay for Environmental Attributes in Seafood

James Hilger (), Eric Hallstein (), Andrew Stevens and Sofia Villas-Boas
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James Hilger: Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Eric Hallstein: The Nature Conservancy

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2019, vol. 73, issue 1, No 14, 307-332

Abstract: Abstract We investigate whether consumers are willing to pay for sustainability in seafood. To do this, we estimate a logit random utility model (RUM) of seafood purchases using a product-level scanner dataset from a quasi-experimental setting that includes data both before and after the implementation of a seafood advisory and sustainability label. Each seafood product is defined as a bundle of attributes, including price, species, and sustainability rating. The sustainability rating is communicated to consumers through the use of a color-based traffic light label system, where a color rating is assigned to each seafood stock-keeping unit. Combining a structural demand model with a difference-in-differences approach allows us to take advantage of the implementation of the labeling treatment in a subset of stores in the local retail chain to estimate consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for green, yellow, and red sustainability labels. We find that the addition of a yellow sustainability label negatively impacts consumer’s WTP for seafood products, however this simple average effect does not fully capture many independent underlying mechanisms, such as consumer preferences for wild-caught versus farmed products, and the color-distribution of available labeled products within a species, which are empirically explored. Additional results from a second stage generalized least squares regression of RUM product fixed effects on product characteristics indicate that consumers prefer selective harvest methods, wild caught seafood, and U.S. caught seafood.

Keywords: Eco-labels; Traffic-light labels; Sustainable seafood; Random utility model; Quasi-experimental; Information provision; Environmental policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: Measuring Willingness to Pay for Environmental Attributes in Seafood (2016)
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DOI: 10.1007/s10640-018-0264-6

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