Experts and Activists: How Information Affects the Demand for Food Irradiation

Dermot Hayes, John Fox and Jason Shogren

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The public must decide between assertions made about food safety through irradiation by advocacy groups and by scientific experts. Herein we discuss the policy implications of experimental results that show how favorable and unfavorable information on food irradiation to reduce risks affects willingness-to-pay to control the food-borne pathogen Trichinella in irradiated pork. The surprising result is that when we presented both positive and negative information simultaneously, the negative information clearly dominated. This was true even though the source of the negative information was identified as being a consumer advocacy group and the information itself was written in a manner that was non-scientific. Keywords: Food demand; Information impact; Consumer experiments

Date: 2002-01-01
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Published in Food Policy, April 2002, vol. 27 no. 2, pp. 185-193

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Related works:
Working Paper: Experimental in Environmental Economics (2003)
Journal Article: Experts and activists: how information affects the demand for food irradiation (2002)
Journal Article: EXPERIMENTAL METHODS IN CONSUMER PREFERENCE STUDIES (1996)
Working Paper: Experimental Methods in Consumer Preference Studies (1996)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genres:10105

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