Measuring the relative importance of preferences for country of origin in China, France, Niger, and the United States

Abstract

Recent labeling policies in developed countries place new focus on origin labeling, especially country of origin labeling, for a variety of food products. It is not clear if this new emphasis on origin is the result of more ethnocentric consumer preferences for food. We measure consumer preferences for country of origin in four different international locations and one domestic control location using a conjoint experiment to test the null hypotheses that consumers do not have stronger own-country preferences. In addition, we compare the relative importance of consumer preferences for origin to their preferences for genetically modified food and pesticide-free production using attribute coefficients from within location ordered probit models. The study was conducted in China, France, Niger, and the United States. We find consumers tend to prefer food from their own location indicating ethnocentric tendencies do play a role in shaping country-of-origin preferences. Country of origin is generally less important to consumers than genetically modified food content and pesticide use in food production. Copyright (c)2008 International Association of Agricultural Economists.

European consumers and beef safety: Perceptions, expectations and uncertainty reduction strategies

“…country or region of origin, production method-related information like organic beef or grass-fed beef, a traceability certification, or a quality guarantee (Krystallis & Arvanitoyannis, 2006;Verbeke & Ward, 2006). The information revealed on the label transforms the underlying criterion from a credence or experience attribute into a search attribute (Ehmke et al, 2006). Notwithstanding, the labelling of food safety in itself is not that obvious.…”

“…smart packaging) (Cho, 2002). Providing information disclosures turns experience and credence attributes into search attributes (Ehmke, Lusk, & Tyner, 2006). These transformations enable consumers to evaluate the safety characteristics of beef during purchase, and to choose beef products that correspond to their preferences (Banterle & Stranieri, 2008).…”

Liking of Traditional Cheese and Consumer Willingness to Pay

“…The major dimension of place-of-origin attributes that have been studied in agricultural economics and marketing literature since the 1960s is country-of-origin (Dichter, 1962;Balabanis and Diamantopoulos, 2004;Ehmke et al, 2008), whereas in the last decade region-of-origin attributes have been studied separately, in relation with consumers' values for tradition and authenticity of agro-food products (Van der Lans et al, 2001). The concept of place-of-origin attributes has often been used in the literature (Van der Lans et al, 2001;Skuras and Vakrou, 2002) to generalise the analysis across country-of-origin attributes and region-of-origin attributes.…”

“…Various studies in marketing and agricultural economics have agreed that POO attributes may have a positive impact on consumers' evaluation of products (Dichter, 1962;Peterson and Jolibert, 1995;Ehmke et al, 2008), but also a negative impact when country image is not favourable to consumers or when the image of the place does not fit with the product . Liefeld (2004) questioned the importance of the country of origin in the decisions of consumers and the core findings in this area of study.…”

The effect of sensory experience on expected preferences toward a masking strategy for boar-tainted frankfurter sausages

“…As a results, several attributes are identified as the main extrinsic and intrinsic descriptors of the product (Font-i-Furnols & Guerrero, 2014) from which we highlight: The physiological quality cues such as the water-binding capacity (Bredahl et al, 1998), the colour, meat appearance and the shelf-life (Topel et al, 1976;Glitsch, 2000;Fortomaris et al, 2006;Ngapo et al, 2007), the fat content (Verbeke et al, 2005;, the price (Murphy et al 2015), the food safety claims (Finn & Louviere, 1992;Grunert, 2005;Grunert et al, 2015), the meat quality (Verbeke et al, 2010;Grunert et al, 2015), the origin (Huang & Fu, 1995;Ehmke et al, 2008), the product convenience (Grunert et al, 2004) the traceability (Loureiro et al, 2007), the brand and the label information Fenger et al, 2015), the production methods such as organic, conventional, free range and hormone free meats Dransfield et al, 2005), the health claims (Scollan et al, 2006;Realini et al, 2014), the ethical claims mainly animal welfare aspects (Verbeke & Viaene, 2000) and the environmental claims such as the carbon food print (Koistinen et al, 2013).…”