Environmental Valuation of Unlabeled Technology Adoption: Theory and Application to Tomato Production and Consumption

Jianfeng Gao and George Norton

No 169940, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: The adoption of new technologies by farmers may impact the environment, and hence affect consumer welfare. This channel of impact is seldom assessed in the literature, especially when the production technologies adopted are not labeled on the consumption goods, and as a result are not directly observed by the consumers. We propose a novel theoretical framework where the supply of and demand for an agricultural good are incorporated to estimate consumers’ general and partial equilibrium willingness to pay (WTP) for producers’ unlabeled technology adoption choices. The framework is applied to a sample of 219 tomato farms and a sample of 498 consumers in Maryland, New York and Ohio. Results show that the consumer’s average partial equilibrium marginal WTPs for the tomato grower’s adoption of single-species cover crops, mixed-species cover crops, and environmentally-sound greenhouses range from -1.28 to -1.78 $/lb, 1.36 to 1.76 $/lb, and 1.63 to 1.94 $/lb, respectively, compared to the baseline scenario where cover crops and greenhouses are not adopted. In contrast, the corresponding general equilibrium marginal WTPs are between -1.15 and -0.98 $/lb, between 1.30 and 1.67 $/lb, and between 0.24 and 0.32 $/lb, respectively.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 2
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/169940/files/G ... AEA_PosterR_2014.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:aaea14:169940

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.169940

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().