A Taste for Safer Beef? How Much Does Consumers’ Perceived Risk Influence Willingness to Pay for Country‐of‐Origin Labeled Beef

Abstract

Past studies have shown that country of origin labeling (COOL) affects consumers' demand for food products. However, besides the rationale of ethnocentrism or the desire to support domestic farmers, the underlying motivation for such behavior is not well understood. This study assesses consumers' preferences for imported and domestic beef through a choice experiment. We found that willingness to pay for country-of-origin labeled imported beefsteak is associated with (a) consumers' perceptions of the categorical risk from consuming beef, (b) consumers' risk aversion to risks from beef consumption, and (c) consumers' perceptions of the food-safety level of imported beef. Results from this study suggest that the advantage of domestic beef over imported beef can be partly explained by consumers' risk handling behavior. [EconLit citations: Q130]. C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

How Local Is Local? A Reflection on Canadian Local Food Labeling Policy from Consumer Preference

“…On average, the WTP for beefsteak labeled LOCAL over beefsteak produced from the United States was around $7.00/lb. The strong disfavoring of imported beef echoed observations in other studies (Tonsor et al ; Abidoye et al ; Lim et al ).…”

Estimation of consumer willingness‐to‐pay for social responsibility in fruit and vegetable products: A cross‐country comparison using a choice experiment

“…Regarding production practices, consumers are generally willing to pay a premium for organic or nongenetically modified products as well as reduced use of hormones and antibiotics compared to some conventional practices or no given information (Ding, Veeman, & Adamowicz, ; Lim et al, ; Miller et al, ; Ortega et al, ; Probst et al, ; Wu et al, ; Zanoli et al, ). Recently, these practices have also considered nanotechnology (Erdem, ; Yue, Zhao, & Kuzma, ).…”

Fear and trust: How risk perceptions of avian influenza affect Chinese consumers’ demand for chicken

“…In other words, the economic implication of a food safety incident is dynamic (Liu, Huang, & Brown, 1998;Caswell & Mojduszka, 1996) and may display properties of hysteresis (Turvey et al, 2010). While not often used to investigate risk perceptions related to food quality or food scares, Hallman, Hebden, Aquino, Cuite, and Lang (2003) have used similar queries to understand consumer attitudes towards genetically modified food, Turvey, Onyango, Schilling, and Hallman (2009) to investigate consumer response to Mad Cow disease, Lim et al (2014) to examine the interaction between consumer risk perceptions and their preference for beef from different countries, and Turvey et al (2010) to investigate risk perceptions on hypothetical incidents of agro-terrorism and bird flu.…”

“…This has been a topic of considerable interest to economists (e.g. Hayes, Shogren, Shin, & Kliebenstein, 1995;Brown, Longworth, & Waldron, 2002;Wang, Mao, & Gale, 2008;Turvey, Onyango, Cuite, & Hallman, 2010;Ortega, Wang, Olynk, Wu, & Bai, 2012;Lim, Hu, Maynard, & Goddard, 2014). In many cases, how consumers respond to a food risk is a matter of judgment and affect with an effective response determined by how one perceives the goodness or badness about an event or stimulus (Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000;Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004), the images that they form of the disease (Jackson, 2006) or the availability of risk (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).…”