Sustainability trade-offs in animal husbandry: Consumers’ choice when they can't have it all

Abstract

This paper investigates consumer choices in the presence of conflicting goals, with and without information making conflicts salient. An experimental online study was conducted with a sample of German consumers, focusing on pig farming. The results show that personal health benefits outweigh animal welfare considerations, while the latter still weigh more than environment-related sustainability attributes. Providing information can have ambiguous effects, depending on the sustainability trade-off being investigated and the type of information provided. The findings reveal that consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences for different protected goods, and these differences can be attributed to psychographic and socio-demographic factors.