Chinese consumers’ willingness to pay for pork traceability information—the case of Wuxi

Abstract

In this study, consumers' willingness to pay for farming, slaughter and processing, distribution and marketing, and government certification information was investigated in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China using an experimental auction and real choice experiment based on incentive compatibility of the nonhypothetical elicitation method. No significant differences in consumers' willingness to pay were revealed by the experimental auction and real choice experiment on the whole, and results from both nonhypothetical experimental methods demonstrated that consumers were willing to pay certain premiums for all four types of traceability information and had the highest willingness to pay for government certification information. These results indicate that consumers trust in pork safety protection under governmental supervision. Moreover, it was found that government certification information played a significant role in improving consumer utility, demonstrating that consumers paid close attention to safety risks in farming. Therefore, this study predicts that the introduction of governmental supervision into the pork traceability system and establishment of a system for collecting traceability information starting from the stage of pig farming will play important roles in meeting consumer demands for pork quality and safety, as well as promoting the development of traceable food policies. JEL classifications: Q18

Inducing value and institutional learning effects in stated choice experiments using advanced disclosure and instructional choice set treatments

“…The results from the RPL model, presented in Table below, show that the mean coefficients of all attributes are statistically significant at conventional levels and have the expected signs. Our results are in line with previous studies which investigate origin, production systems (organic vs. conventional), or food safety (see, e.g., Ehmke et al., ; Rihn et al., ; Wu et al., ; Xie et al., ). The coefficients of the standard deviations of the attributes are also significant except for the Campylobacter‐free label.…”

Consumer Preferences for Traceable Food with Different Functions of Safety Information Attributes: Evidence from a Menu-Based Choice Experiment in China

“…The effectiveness of ex post traceability depends on whether the establishment of information attributes completely covers the critical risk points in the supply chain. As shown in Figure 1, the main risks to pork are included in all processes of the supply chain system (i.e., farming, slaughter, transportation, and marketing) [9]. A traceability system that includes information attributes of only some of these processes cannot effectively achieve ex post traceability.…”

“…Furthermore, according to Xue [35], and Wu [9,28], consumer's choice of food attribute is affected by the price of this attribute, the price of other attributes, individual characteristics of the participants, family characteristics, cognitive attitudes, past experience, and other factors. Thus, the consumer choice model can also be expressed as:…”

“…Ex post traceability allows for timely recall with complete traceability information along the food supply chain in the event of food safety problems and establishes accountability for such problems. Currently, the policies of the Chinese traceable pork market system mainly focus on sporadic work guidelines and pilot traceable pork systems in the Chinese market, which only allow for ex post traceability [8] and might explain the current failure of such systems [9]. The production of traceable pork with both ex ante quality verification and ex post traceability will inevitably increase costs, which will be reflected in the market price.…”

Traceability information modeling and system implementation in Chinese domestic sheep meat supply chains

“…At present, stakeholders in the meat industry have implemented traceability mainly to improve product flow, control product quality, and limit security scandals (Vol, 2004;Winn et al, 2015). Researches on traceability covers a range of topics: traceability system development (Donnelly, Karlsen, & Olsen, 2009;Feng, Fu, Wang, Xu, & Zhang, 2013;Marchi, Penasa, Cecchinato, & Bittante, 2013;Song, Liu, Wang, & Nanseki, 2008;Xiao, Fu, Zhang, Peng, & Zhang, 2017;Zhang, Fu, Xiao, Zhang, & Li, 2017); traceability modeling (Liang, Cao, Fan, Zhu, & Dai, 2015;Zhang, Lv, Xu, & Mu, 2010); consumers' willingness to pay for traceability (Bai et al, 2013;Mørkbak, Christensen, & Gyrd-Hansen, 2011;Wu et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2016;Zhang, Bai, & Wahl, 2012). Some researches on sheep meat traceability have also been conducted and introduced several mechanisms.…”