University Students’ Purchase Intention and Willingness to Pay for Carbon-Labeled Food Products: A Purchase Decision-Making Experiment

Abstract

Carbon labeling describes carbon dioxide emissions across food lifecycles, contributing to enhancing consumers’ low-carbon awareness and promoting low-carbon consumption behaviors. In a departure from the existing literature on carbon labeling that heavily relies on interviews or questionnaire surveys, this study forms a hybrid of an auction experiment and a consumption experiment to observe university students’ purchase intention and willingness to pay for a carbon-labeled food product. In this study, students from a university in a city (Chengdu) of China, the largest carbon emitter, are taken as the experimental group, and cow’s milk is selected as the experimental food product. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: (1) the purchase of carbon-labeled milk products is primarily influenced by price; (2) the willingness to pay for carbon-labeled milk products primarily depends on the premium; and (3) the students are willing to accept a maximum price premium of 3.2%. This study further offers suggestions to promote the formation of China’s carbon product-labeling system and the marketization of carbon-labeled products and consequently facilitate low-carbon consumption in China.

Paying for Sustainable Coffee in a Developing Country: Consumers’ Profile in Costa Rica

“…Mostafa [71] found that consumers in Egypt are willing to pay a price premium of approximately 75 Egyptian pounds for carbon-labeled products. For the case of Chinese consumers, see Zhao et al [72].…”

Revisiting the promise of carbon labelling

“…Moreover, studies typically focus on a particular product (e.g., coffee, tomatoes, light bulbs, washing machines) or product category (e.g., meat, dairy products, home appliances, building materials), which permits assessing within-product (category) effects but not substitution and spillover effects. Another important limitation is that most studies have evaluated labeling effects as self-reported willingness to pay, purchase intention, noticeability or visual attention, and preference for label designs 10,64,72,73,83 . Limited evidence is available for assessing the effects of carbon and energy labeling on actual purchasing and consumption behavior for products with high technical potential to reduce emissions (e.g., air travel), perhaps due to the difficulty of accessing actual sales data.…”

Chinese Consumers’ Preference and Willingness to Pay for Carbon-Labeled Forest Fruit Products

“…For example, Shuai et al [11] conducted a scenario experiment to analyze consumers' preferences and WTP for agricultural products, such as bananas and eggs, and instant noodles with low, medium, and high carbon labels. Zhao and Zhong [12] combined auction experiments with consumer experiments to observe college students' willingness to purchase and pay for food products with carbon labels. Compared with the revealed preference methods, the stated preference methods are more effective in describing market responses when the products have not yet appeared on the market, which is the case for carbonlabeled products in the Chinese market as they have not yet been widely circulated.…”