Consumer Preferences for Animal Welfare Attributes: The Case of Gestation Crates

Abstract

Animal welfare concerns are having dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets. Here we examine consumer preferences for pork products with a focus on use of gestation crates. We examine underlying consumer valuations of pork attributes while considering preference heterogeneity as well as voluntary and legislative alternatives in producing gestation crate-free pork. Our results suggest that prohibiting swine producers from using gestation crates fails to improve consumer welfare in the presence of a labeling scheme documenting voluntary disadoption of gestation crates. Consumers are found to implicitly associate animal welfare attributes with smaller farms. Preference heterogeneity drives notably diverse consumer welfare impacts when pork produced with use of gestation crates is no longer available for consumption.

Retail channel and consumer demand for food quality in China

“…Choice modeling and related experimental methods can be applied to non-market goods, such as food quality, for which marginal valuations are difficult or impossible to measure in the marketplace. These methods have been used extensively for analyzing consumer preferences for food safety attributes (e.g., Ifft, Roland-Holst, & Zilberman, 2012;Loureiro & Umberger, 2007;Ortega, Wang, & Olynk Widmar, 2014a;Ortega et al, 2011;Ubilava & Foster, 2009), organic and "Green Food" certification in China (Yu, Gao, & Zeng, 2014a;Yu, Yan, & Gao, 2014b), animal welfare assurance (Lagerkvist & Hess, 2011;Norwood & Lusk, 2011;Olynk & Ortega, 2013;Tonsor, Olynk, & Wolf, 2009), producer behavior (Ortega, Wang, Olynk Widmar, & Wu, 2014b;Schulz & Tonsor, 2010;Ward, Ortega, Spielman, & Singh, 2014), and for estimating welfare effects of various agricultural and food policies (Lusk, Norwood, & Pruitt, 2006;Ortega, Wang, Olynk, Wu, & Bai, 2012;Tonsor et al, 2009). While research on food retail has been conducted since the emergence of the supermarket revolution in China (see Bai, Wahl, & McCluskey, 2008;Goldman, 2000Goldman, , 2001Hu, Reardon, Rozelle, Timmer, & Wang, 2004;Mai & Zhao, 2004;Reardon et al, 2010), research linking consumer demand for food quality and retail channel is missing from the literature.…”

Broad breeding goals and production costs in dairy farming

“…Third, consumers are increasingly interested in how their food is produced and the welfare of animals in the process (Rauw et al 1998;Tonsor et al 2009;Garcia et al 2011). Consumer concerns about animal welfare are likely to increase further with increasing income levels and lower costs of acquiring and distributing information.…”

The market for animal welfare

“…While some consumers are willing to pay premiums for certified or more humanly labeled meat products (e.g., see Carlsson et al 2007;Lusk et al 2007;Tonsor et al 2009), that does not mean they will if they do not have to. Type II consumers act on the basis of private incentives to purchase more humanly-produced meat (e.g., they think it tastes better or is safer-see Norwood et al 2007), but economists are generally skeptical of the notion that people are sufficiently altruistic to wholly internalize the cost of the externality.…”