Considering the temporary closure of many food-away-from-home establishments, consumer expenditure on groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased. While grocery shopping is an essential activity, not much is known about the dynamic relationship of the COVID-19 pandemic to the behavior of grocery shoppers. With an objective to inform variability in the behavior of grocery shoppers under various scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted an online framed choice experiment to elicit preferences for purchasing methods, time windows, minimum order requirements, and fees. The manipulating factor relates to the trend in the COVID-19 pandemic, where we consider three scenarios: an increasing, decreasing, or constant number of new cases in the past two-week period. Using 32,400 choice decisions from a representative sample of 900 grocery shoppers in the United States, we conclude that the trend in the COVID-19 pandemic causes significant differences in grocery shopping preferences. In situations where COVID-19 is spreading at an increasing rate, consumers are generally less willing to shop inside the grocery store. When COVID-19 is spreading at a decreasing rate, the relative importance of the purchasing method attribute is lower in its entirety. We use our findings to inform recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

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Episodic future thinking, defined as the ability to project oneself into the future, has proven useful to pre-experience the future consequences of present actions. We investigate how episodic future thinking influences the food choices of normal weight, overweight, and obese individuals. In doing so, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants are presented with representations of weight-increased and weight-reduced modified images of themselves before performing a food choice task. This allows subjects to vividly imagine the future consequences of their actions. We also test the effect of providing health-related information on food choices to compare with the episodic future thinking effect. Our results suggest that while providing health-related information increases the number of lite snack choices of overweight and obese individuals, engaging in episodic future thinking has a positive impact on the food choices of the obese only. These findings are supported by eye-tracking data showing how visual attention and emotional arousal (measured by pupil size) impact individuals’ food choices.

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A within-subjects experiment with eye tracking was implemented to test the consistency of preferences over three repeated choice experiments. The empirical results indicate that after changing the position of the same alternatives in the choice set, participants were consistent with their choices 69 per cent of the time. Moreover, after reverting back to the identical original positions of the alternatives but randomising the order of the choice sets, individuals’ choices were consistent 67 per cent of the time. Eye tracking data revealed that subjects’ visual attention towards the product attributes was also consistent over the sequence of choices. The robustness of these results was further demonstrated by using random parameters models with flexible mixing distributions to calculate willingness-to-pay for the product attributes and compare its consistency across choice experiments.

By randomizing the order in which participants perform a cognitive test and a food choice task in a controlled experiment, we investigate whether cognitive capacity can be enhanced by the simple act of anticipating food intake. Our findings show that overweight and obese participants exhibit an anticipatory food reward effect, which helped enhance their mental resources and improve their performance in a cognitive test. However, we find no anticipation effect among normal weight participants. Furthermore, eye tracking data reveal that food temptation, in the form of visual attention and emotional arousal is higher for overweight and obese individuals when they are cognitively impaired.

A non-hypothetical second-price Vickrey auction was conducted to elicit consumer preferences and willingness to pay for vegetable attributes, including production technique, origin, taste, and health benefits. Using a Latent Class Analysis (LCA) we segmented participants based on healthdriven motivations, willingness to pay estimates, and socioeconomic characteristics. Two latent classes were found and characterized as: "Health Conscious", and "Health Redeemers". In particular, the "Health Conscious" consumers presented healthy lifestyle habits, expressed price premiums for domestic and local-specialty food products after a blind tasting treatment, but they did not have price premiums for health benefits of the products. On the contrary, the "Health Redeemers" presented unhealthy lifestyles but they were willing to pay more for healthy food products, perhaps in an attempt to make up for their unhealthy habits.