No abstract

Due in part to increasing diet-related health problems caused, among others, by obesity, nutritional labelling has been considered important, mainly because it can provide consumers with information that can be used to make informed and healthier food choices. Several studies have focused on the empirical perspective of nutritional label use. None of these studies, however, have focused on developing a theoretical economic model that would adequately describe nutritional label use based on a utility theoretic framework. We attempt to fill this void by developing a simple theoretical model of nutritional label use, incorporating the time a consumer spends reading labels as part of the food choice process. The demand equations of the model are then empirically tested. Results suggest the significant role of several variables that flow directly from the model which, to our knowledge, have not been used in any previous empirical work.

In this paper, we review recent advances in experimental auctions and provide practical advice and guidelines for researchers. We focus on issues related to randomisation to treatment and causal identification of treatment effects, design issues such as selection between different elicitation formats, multiple auction groups in a single session and house money effects. We also discuss sample size and power analysis issues in relation to recent trends in experimental research about pre-registration and pre-analysis plans. We position our discussion with respect to how the agricultural economics profession could benefit from practices adapted in the experimental economics community. We then present the pros and cons of moving auction studies from the laboratory to the field and review the recent literature on behavioural factors that have been identified as important for auction outcomes.

In this paper, we review published studies to assess the influence of time preferences on human health behaviour. Our review indicates that elicited discount rates for health have been found to be higher than those for money in both the social and private context. We discuss the importance of discount rates for public policy since high time discount rates can contribute to governmental emphasis on acute health care, rather than preventive health care. We then examine how time preferences interrelate with specific health concerns such as smoking or obesity. We find that even when time preferences are elicited in the monetary domain, they can be successful in predicting smoking cessation and likewise for obesity. We also discuss how time preferences relate with teen risk taking behavior. JEL codes: D91, I0