No abstract

The melamine milk powder incident in China undermined consumers' confidence in dairy products including infant milk-based formula (IMF). In this study, three quality IMF product attributes are considered in a choice experiment survey in China including organic label, traceability information, and country of origin (COO). Results reveal that consumers have the highest willingness to pay (WTP) for an organic label from the United States. Traceability information regarding milk production was preferred the most. Consumers prefer IMF originated from the United States and New Zealand over China. Consumer heterogeneity was revealed through a latent class model. Compared to price-sensitive consumers, certification-inclined consumers had significantly higher WTP for organic labels. Origin-preferred consumers displayed higher WTP for IMF produced in the United States and New Zealand, and concerned consumers had higher WTP for all food safety informational attributes. The conclusions of this paper should not only aid Chinese domestic producers and policy makers, they should also provide references for organic certification bodies and dairy enterprises from around the world for their business decision making.

Although numerous studies have examined consumer preference for organic foods, few have focused on consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for organic labels from dissimilar countries or certifiers. We conducted a choice experiment to examine how Chinese consumer ethnocentrism and trust on organic labels and certifiers may affect their WTP for organic labels from different countries as well as for different certifiers. Chinese consumers did not show a high level of ethnocentrism, and this may lead to inconsistencies in their WTP for organic labels. Significantly, consumer preferences for certifiers did not change remarkably with the increase in consumer ethnocentrism. Chinese consumers generally preferred organic labels from developed countries (or US-invested organic certifiers). With increases in the trust in labels, consumer WTP for each type of organic label increased in general, but the difference between WTPs for organic labels from different countries decreased. Similar results were observed in consumer WTP for certifiers. Determining distinct preferences for organic labels from various sources and countries can be a valuable reference for manufacturers or international certification service providers to choose target markets and for governments to establish their certification systems.

China uses a multilevel agricultural certification system; however, its implications are not well understood. In this study, we used tomatoes as an example in a series of Becker-DeGroot-Marschak auction experiments to determine consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) toward three safety certification labels and two kinds of brands. Then, based on the auction experiment results, we designed a menu-based choice experiment to assess the interaction relationships between the safety certification labels and brands. The results showed that consumers were generally willing to pay a premium for tomatoes with safety-certified labels (especially for organic labels) and brands (especially for the enterprise brand). Providing consumers with additional information regarding the certification remarkably improved their WTP for tomatoes with organic and green labels. The menu-based choice experiment suggested that the organic and green labels were found to be substitutes. In addition, organic and green labels could not substitute the enterprise brand, whereas the converse of this relationship was true. Finally, a mutual substitution relationship was observed between hazard-free label and enterprise brand. Our research enables producers to consider the interaction between certification strategies and brand strategies. Therefore, marketers and policymakers should take steps to promote and expand consumers’ knowledge on certification, as it could benefit the development of certified food.

Because of cost and time limitations, reliability experiments frequently contain subsampling, which is a restriction on randomization. A two-stage approach can analyze right censored Weibull distributed reliability data with subsampling. However, in implementing such a method, we found that it did not address the problems of how to perform confidence intervals of low percentiles and reduce the bias of estimates. In this paper, we present a two-stage bootstrapping approach and an unbiasing factor approach to solve the aforementioned problems. An example is provided to illustrate the proposed method. In addition, the proposed method is compared with existing methods through simulation. The resulting simulations show that the proposed method performs well in low percentiles.