Consumer Valuations of Beef Steak Food Safety Enhancement in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States

Abstract

"Food safety concerns have had dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets in recent years. We examine consumer preferences for beef steak food safety assurances. We evaluate the extent to which preferences are heterogeneous within and across country-of-residence defined groups and examine the distributional nature of preferences with respect to marginal improvements in food safety. Using mixed logit models, we find that consumers in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States have willingness to pay preferences that are nonlinear in the level of food safety risk reduction. In particular, consumers in Japan and Mexico have preferences that are convex and consumers in Canada and the United States have preferences concave in the level of food safety enhancement." Copyright (c) 2009 Canadian Agricultural Economics Society.

Valuing Preferences for Environmental Sustainability in Fruit Production by United Kingdom and Japanese Consumers

“…While German and British consumers would pay more for growth hormone-free beef and French and German consumers are willing to pay for farm-specific source verification. Other studies finding disparities include preferences for food safety in beef steaks across Canada, Japan, Mexico and the US (Tonsor et al, 2009); meat traceability in the US, Canada, the UK and Japan (Dickinson & Bailey, 2005); Fair Trade coffee in Germany and the US (Basu & Hicks, 2008); Farm animal welfare in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK (Nocella, Hubbard, & Scarpa, 2010).…”

“…There is a recognition that consumers from different countries may respond differently to the same environmental attribute with willingness to pay (WTP), especially for socially responsible and origin-based food products, dependent in part on the culture and traditions of countries' consumers (McCluskey & Loureiro, 2003). Considering the possible implications for collaborative climate mitigation policy, and specialization of export strategies, there is surprisingly scant literature providing direct cross-country comparisons of consumer preferences for sustainability attributes of food products (Basu & Hicks, 2008;Tonsor, Schroeder, Pennings, & Mintert, 2009). …”

Impact of environmental and social attitudes, and family concerns on willingness to pay for improved air quality: a contingent valuation application in Mexico City

“…(Birol et al 2009;Scarpa et al 2003). Additional topics cover valuation of food safety (Tonsor et al 2009), smoking cessation treatment (HerediaPi et al 2012), cross-border health insurance (Vargas-Bustamante et al 2008), environmentally certified products (Husted et al, 2014), and archeological zones (Beltrán and Rojas 1996). execution are hampered if enumerators have poor understanding of the contingent valuation instrument (Whittington 2002). Conceptual simplicity and comparability to a real-life situation eases explanation and understanding for both enumerators and respondents.…”

Point-of-Sale Specific Willingness to Pay for Quality-Differentiated Beef

“…We used mixed logit (ML) for the econometric model, as with studies of similar scope [38,40,50]. ML possesses two advantages: first, it accounts for potential heterogeneity in consumers' preferences; second, it relaxes the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternative assumption [51].…”

“…The experiment featured the relatively homogenous and common steak cut of strip-loin steak as the representative product. This specific cut has been used in previous studies [39,40].The choice experiment examined three common quality-differentiated attributes of beef-local, organic, and grass-fed [20,41,42]. Four levels of prices were included, ranging from $8.99/lb to $16.49/lb, reflecting steak prices in the average-to-higher-end markets at the time of the study [43].…”