Do Japanese consumers care about sustainable fisheries? Evidence from an auction of ecolabelled seafood

Abstract

This paper investigates Japanese consumers' willingness to pay for Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabelled seafood using a sealed bid, second price auction. Participants in an experiment in Tokyo were provided varying degrees of information about the status of world and Japanese fisheries and the MSC program in sequential rounds of bidding on ecolabelled and nonlabelled salmon products. A random-effects tobit regression shows that there is a statistically significant premium of about 20 per cent for MSC-ecolabelled salmon over nonlabelled salmon when consumers are provided information on both the status of global fish stocks and the purpose of the MSC program. This premium arises from a combination of an increased willingness to pay for labelled products and a decreased willingness to pay for unlabelled products. However, in the absence of experimenter-provided information, or when provided information about the purpose of the MSC program alone without concurrent information about the need for the MSC program, there is no statistically significant premium.

The Sustainable Seafood Movement Is a Governance Concert, with the Audience Playing a Key Role

“…The significance of ecolabels in particular markets is dynamic, with ecolabels for canned tuna becoming important in new markets where previously they have not been [102]. Studies in China and Japan have found when people were given information about overfishing before undertaking willingness-to-pay surveys, they showed more positive responses to ecolabels than people who were not given this information [103,104]. Spreading the message that seafood consumption patterns are part of the problem of overfishing is a precondition for the sustainable seafood movement to take root in new markets.…”

Consumer behavior in choice of minimally processed vegetables and implications for marketing strategies

“…Laroche et al (2001) argue that consumer attitudes towards the environment are very good predictors of their WTP more for green products. On the other hand, there is limited information as to how much consumers are willing to "sacrifice" for such products (Uchida, Roheim, Wakamatsu, & Anderson, 2014). Henson (1996) claims that WTP is the theoretically valid measure of the value consumers attach to improvements of food safety.…”

Eco-Labeled Seafood: Determinants for (Blue) Green Consumption

“…The majority of studies have focused on capture fisheries and only a few on farmed seafood [6]. Earlier work has either: (a) applied an experimental approach using contingent valuation to estimate consumers' willingness to pay for eco-labeled seafood [7][8][9][10]; (b) examined consumers' attitudes towards eco-labeling of seafood [11][12][13]; (c) more generally explored the perceived importance of sustainability and ethics related to seafood [14,15]; or (d) used market data to investigate whether there is a price premium for eco-certified seafood [16,17]. While this work has substantially increased our understanding of what factors predict willingness to purchase sustainable seafood, to our knowledge, no study has yet investigated how consumers' self-reported purchasing behavior of eco-labeled seafood is correlated with environmental knowledge and other internal factors expected to predict pro-environmental consumption.…”