More than Meets the Eye: Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Marine Stewardship Council’s Certified Seafood

Kar Ho Lim (), Carola Grebitus (), Wuyang Hu and Rodolfo Nayga

No 205634, 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certificate provides great promise as a market-based tool for sustainable fisheries but to succeed in the market a critical share of producers needs to participate in the program. Since consumers’ willingness to pay is a driver of producer participation, we conduct a consumer choice experiment to determine U.S. American consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay for MSC certification for canned tuna. We find that most U.S. American consumers are willing to pay for MSC-certified seafood. Also, results show that MSC certification might be especially advantageous for exporting producers from developing countries. Finally, our modeling allows us to determine complementary effects that MSC might have with other attributes. The results provide insights to stakeholders in the seafood industry on the effectiveness of MSC certification in championing sustainable fisheries. Recommendations based on willingness to pay for sustainable seafood labeled with MSC are provided.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Consumer/Household Economics; Environmental Economics and Policy; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-env and nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/205634/files/ECOLABEL-paper%20submitted.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:aaea15:205634

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.205634

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().