Buying your way into a healthier lifestyle: a latent class analysis of healthy food purchases

Abstract

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.

Spanish Consumer Purchase Behaviour and Stated Preferences for Yoghurts with Nutritional and Health Claims

“…In other words, within each segment, consumer preferences are homogeneous, but they vary between segments, reflecting a ‘lumpy’ spread preference and allowing a more in-depth understanding of heterogeneity [40]. This approach has also been used to analyse consumer preferences for agricultural products, enabling the identification of distinct patterns of valuation and behaviour, [13,35,48,49,50,51], among others. In the LC model, the utility of the individual n choosing alternative j in the t th choice alternative is calculated as follows:Unjt|S = βSXnjt+ εnjt|S where βS is a parameter vector of class S associated with the vector of explanatory variables, and Xnjt and εnjt|S are error terms that follow a Type-I (or Gumbel) distribution.…”

Consumer Preferences for Superfood Ingredients—the Case of Bread in Germany

“…Furthermore, Wang et al (2017) [26] used a latent class logit model to investigate U.S. consumer preferences for attributes of fresh market strawberries. Regarding the health benefits of foods, Segovia and Palma (2015) [27] used an LCA to segment participants by their willingness to pay for vegetable attributes, including production technique, origin, taste, and health benefits.…”

Consumer preferences for grocery purchasing during the COVID-19 pandemic: a quantile regression approach

“…The selection of variables included in x 2 i was based upon data availability and previous studies analyzing consumer food purchase behavior (e.g. Piroth et al , 2020; Segovia and Palma, 2016). Age, gender, education, household size, living with elder/s in the same house, rural residency and the location where the respondent lives constitute the demographic variables included in x 2 i .…”

“…risk aversion) characteristics to inform consumer segmentation (e.g. Piroth et al, 2020;Segovia and Palma, 2016). In doing so, researchers allow practitioners to find segments of consumers with similar demographic and psychographic characteristics and thus to pursue product or process differentiation, a common firm strategy in the segmented food consumer marketplace (Cucagna and Goldsmith, 2018;Gehlhar et al, 2009).…”

“…τ represents quantile, WTP in ðτjx 1 ; x 2i Þ is the conditional WTP quantile function. The selection of variables included in x 2i was based upon data availability and previous studies analyzing consumer food purchase behavior (e.g Piroth et al, 2020;Segovia and Palma, 2016)…”