We use hedonic prices and purchase quantities to consider what can be learned about household willingness to pay for baskets of organic products and how this varies across households. We use rich scanner data on food purchases by a large number of households to compute household speci…c lower and upper bounds on willingness to pay for various baskets of organic products. These bounds provide information about willingness to pay for organic without imposing restrictive assumptions on preferences. We show that the reasons households are willing to pay vary, with quality being the most important, health concerns coming second, and environmental concerns lagging far behind. We also show how these methods can be used for example by stores to provide robust upper bounds on the revenue implication of introducing a new line of organic products. JEL: D12, L11, L81, Q51, C81 Correspondence: rgri¢ th@ifs.org.uk, l.nesheim@ucl.ac.uk Acknowledgement: The authors would like to thank James Banks, Richard Blun-dell, Martin Browning, Ian Crawford, Andrew Leicester, Aviv Nevo, Ariel Pakes and Carol Propper for many helpful comments. Financial support from the ESRC through the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS (CPP) and the ESRC Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP) is gratefully acknowledged. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors.

This study investigates the factors affecting consumers’ decisions to purchase organic products. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the data from consumers who are primary shoppers for their households at five retail stores in the Bangkok metropolitan area. Using psychological and socio-demographics variables, exploratory factor analysis and logistic regression was used to examine consumers’ decisions to purchase organic products. Results suggest that consumers who are knowledgeable about organic products often purchase groceries at natural/health food stores, are concerned about health and food safety, and are more likely to purchase organic products. In addition, middle-aged female consumers who are highly educated and in the high income group are more likely to be organic consumers. In contrast, households who often dine out or consume takeaway food are less likely to purchase organic products.