No abstract

false2016-03-16T16:38:26

The importance of customer ratings or reviews in online shopping has been recognized in the previous literature; however, few have studied how online customer rating scores affect consumers’ fresh produce purchases and its importance relative to other fresh produce attributes. The quality of fresh produce demonstrates high uncertainty and variation; therefore, the impact of user‐generated content such as customer rating scores on the choice of fresh produce may be more complex than on other product categories. Moreover, previous studies on customer ratings have not examined the price premium that retailers can obtain based on better ratings of fresh produce. Using a stated preference approach (i.e., choice experiment), this study measures the willingness to pay for a higher customer rating score and explores its relative importance to other popular fresh produce attributes (i.e., organic, place of origin, and shelf life). The results show that customer rating is the second most important attribute after the place of origin and is more important than production methods (e.g., organic and naturally grown) for fresh strawberry purchases. Also, rating scores demonstrate a diminishing marginal impact on consumer willingness to pay. Younger consumers and households with children are willing to pay more for fresh produce with high ratings than those with low ratings.

No abstract

We conduct a series of Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auctions to elicit consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for organic and local blueberries. Participants' intentions to purchase the auction product were collected to determine how purchase intentions for the auction products affect their partial bids (WTP for an additional attribute) as well as full bids (WTP for the auction product). The results suggest, as expected, that full bids from participants with purchase intention for the auction product are significantly higher than those from participants without purchase intention. However, the partial bids, which are inferred from the full bids, for organic and local attributes are consistent across participants with different purchase intentions. Therefore, if the focus of a BDM auction is consumers' WTP for product attributes, purchase intentions may not be an important influence on the value.