A question of taste: Recognising the role of latent preferences and attitudes in analysing food choices

Abstract

9There has long been substantial interest in understanding consumer food choices, where a key complexity 10 in this context is the potentially large amount of heterogeneity in tastes across individual consumers, as 11 well as the role of underlying attitudes towards food and cooking. The present paper underlines that both 12 tastes and attitudes are unobserved, and makes the case for a latent variable treatment of these components. 13Using empirical data collected in Northern Ireland as part of a wider study to elicit intra-household trade-14 offs between home-cooked meal options, we show how these latent sensitivities and attitudes drive both the 15 choice behaviour as well as the answers to supplementary questions. We find significant heterogeneity across 16 respondents in these underlying factors and show how incorporating them in our models leads to important 17 insights into preferences.

Linking Consumers’ Food Choice Motives to their Preferences for Insect‐based Food Products: An Application of Integrated Choice and Latent Variable Model in an African Context

“…These results reinforce the finding that our respondents are promotional oriented, reflecting their tendency to try new foods and diversify their source of foods. The estimates of the threshold levels show that the values are increasing for all indicators from threshold 1 to 5 suggesting that the use of the ordered logit model was appropriate in line with previous works by Daly et al (2012), Hess andBeharry-Borg (2012) andO'Neill et al (2014).…”

“…These results are in line with results from previous studies using the ICLV model (e.g. Daly et al ., ; Hess, ; O'Neill et al ., ; Mariel et al ., ; Yangui et al ., ; Sok et al ., ) which underlined that attitudes, motives as well as personality can be linked to consumer preferences for the attributes of products, and accounting for these factors in choice modelling can enhance our understanding of consumer behaviour. Other choice models such as latent class and mixed logit models can be used to investigate consumer food choice behaviour especially in relation to preference heterogeneity but this would be at risk of endogeneity bias and measurement error.…”

“…They can be interacted with attribute levels (see e.g. Daly et al, 2012;Hess and Beharry-Borg, 2012;O'Neill et al, 2014) or they can be directly inserted in the utility specifications (see e.g. Kim et al, 2014;Mariel et al, 2015;Kassahun et al, 2016).…”

“…To the authors' knowledge, there are only few applications of an ICLV model in the food choice and valuation literature, i.e. O'Neill et al (2014) and Yangui et al (2016). We use an ICLV model to relate consumers' FCMs to their choices in an African context.…”

Incorporación de atributos intangibles en modelos de elección discreta

“…En menor medida se han utilizado en el campo de la economía o el marketing (O'Neill, V. et al, 2014), derivándose actualmente un gran potencial de utilización en estas áreas.…”