Combining data from consumers and traditional medicine practitioners to provide a more complete picture of Chinese bear bile markets

Abstract

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Understanding why consumers in China switch between wild, farmed, and synthetic bear bile products

“…All consumers in our sample would pay more in these severe disease scenarios, suggesting that they were originally compromising on preferred attributes to save money when the need for a product is less urgent (Dutton et al., 2011). In addition, our CPS showed that consumers were reluctant to make their own treatment decisions when they were severely ill, supporting previous findings that medical practitioners are important sources of external advice on bear bile treatments in China (Hinsley et al., 2021). This could be related to consumers’ poor knowledge of how bile is used in treatment because when knowledge of a product is low, people employ heuristics based on social influence to make purchasing decisions (Wood & Hayes, 2012).…”

“…Although online surveys may produce a less representative sample of the public than face‐to‐face surveys, they are particularly useful for accessing difficult‐to‐reach groups. This was important because previous work on Chinese bear bile markets shows that face‐to‐face surveys find relatively few actual consumers (e.g., Dutton et al., 2011; Hinsley et al., 2021). We also chose to use an anonymous online survey because they improve honesty in reporting of sensitive and illegal behavior compared with face‐to‐face surveys (Kreuter et al., 2008).…”

“…This raised the key question as to how the vast supply of cheap, legal, and easily available farmed bear bile affected the demand for wild bile, which today remains expensive, illegal, and much more difficult to procure. With wild bile often viewed as more efficacious (Hinsley et al., 2021), were more past or potential wild bile users satisfied with using only farmed bile or did a larger number of new consumers, drawn into the market by farmed bile, use wild bile on occasion? What matters for bear conservation is not how many people switch but the number of wild gallbladders consumed and whether the number of bears killed for them is sustainable.…”

“…Studies of the wider public in China suggest that most people have never heard of bear bile, let alone consumed it, and that consumers and nonconsumers have different characteristics (Hinsley et al., 2021). We, therefore, hypothesized that previous exposure to a product affects switching behavior, so we applied our DCE to a targeted sample of TCM consumers who had heard of bear bile.…”

“…In China, bear bile is most commonly used as a treatment for ailments of the liver and eyes and a cooling medicine for heatiness , a term for a general feeling of being unwell. It is legally sourced from farms, although illegal markets for wild bile exist (Hinsley et al., 2021). The only known active ingredient in bear bile, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), is used in biomedicine (e.g., the United Kingdom's recommended treatment for primary biliary cirrhosis [NHS, 2019]) and sold and prescribed as a synthetic product worldwide, often in the form of a capsule.…”