Japanese Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Environmentally Friendly Farming Produce Based on Consumer Trustfulness

Abstract

In the past decade, the market share of environmentally friendly farming (EFF) produce in Japan has witnessed relatively rapid growth. However, consumer awareness and purchasing experience of this agricultural produce are still lagging. To study how awareness of EFF produce influences consumer psychology and purchase decisions, we use ordered logistic regression and choice experiments to analyze 600 survey responses collected through online questionnaires. The results show that information from friends and family can have a positive influence on Japanese consumers’ trust in EFF produce. Consumers also show a significant preference for EFF produce in the short term after receiving information about it. By setting up a control group for comparison, we find that, in addition to information, consumer education and income also positively and significantly affect the decision to purchase EFF produce. This study presents a unique perspective between information and consumer decision-making and provides targeted solutions for the promotional and marketing strategy problems faced by EFF produce sellers in Japan. We argue that strengthening regional publicity methods such as community events can enhance EFF producers’ marketing strategies.

Consumer Evaluation of Agricultural Products Produced in Areas Affected by Natural Disasters: A Case Study of Damaged Apples in Japan

“…For product attributes, in addition to the main variables such as price and appearance, we also set cultivation method and donation amount. Previous studies have shown that cultivation methods, including organic cultivation, influence consumers’ WTP [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. In the case of apples, special cultivation was adopted as an alternative cultivation method to organic cultivation because fully organic cultivation is technically difficult and organically grown apples are not available in general supermarkets.…”

How Does Information Influence Consumers’ Purchase Decisions for Environmentally Friendly Farming Produce? Evidence from China and Japan Based on Choice Experiment

“…Nakagawa [33] showed that direct selling helped enhance the consumer perception of organic rice. Researchers have also designed choice experiments to measure consumers' willingness to pay after providing them with information about the environmental significance of EFF produce in groups [35,36].…”

“…This way, the model can be more effective in verifying consumer preferences in actual consumption behavior. Following Yang et al's [36] formula, the utility function of the clogit regression is: For example, after reading the definition of organic and specially cultivated (green food in China) produce, each respondent participated in the choice experiments. Each of the questions included three options: two options containing EFF attributes with price and a "No choice" option.…”

“…This way, the model can be more effective in verifying consumer preferences in actual consumption behavior. Following Yang et al's [36] formula, the utility function of the clogit regression is:…”

“…where i is a chosen commodity attribution, V ni is the observable utility, u ni is the unobservable error term, and x ni is the scenario characteristic of the random variable that consumer n should choose. The coefficient β of x ni is used to describe individual differences in utility equal to V ni , obeying a normal distribution to allow for mean independent analysis with individual attributes" [36] (pp. 4-5).…”