Consumer preferences for organic food: behavior building-up, importance of pricing, information and sensory issues
- Autores: Jéssica Alejandra Avitia Rodríguez
- Directores de la Tesis: Montserrat Costa Font (dir. tes.), José María Gil Roig (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2012
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Domingo Calvo Dopico (presid.), Zein Kallas (secret.), Andreas C. Drichoutis (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
The aim of this thesis is to investigate Spanish consumers purchase motivations and behavior towards organic food by means of determining the key factors that take part on building their behavior. An important contribution of this work consists on providing more evidence on consumers’ underlying motivations to buy organic food for the particular case of Spain and to test the role of sensory “experience” in defining individual new WTP for a post purchasing situation. This thesis investigates the role of personal, economic and social elements in predicting Spain consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions toward organic food. It place together all the relevant variables identified by previous studies developing a new and complex behavioral model on consumers’ organic decision making process. The new conceptual model is developed and tested via structural equation modeling. Results show that attitudes, knowledge, as well as environmental and health concern partially mediates the effects of trust in market agents and risk perceptions on attitudes toward organic food. Furthermore, price and subjective norms have been detected to explain organic food purchase intention. Next, this thesis analyzes the factors affecting consumer’s willingness to pay (WTP) for organic food. In this context, the most widely used valuation methods have been Conjoint Analysis and Choice Experiments. However, discrete choice and conjoint data do not offer immediate financial consequences for the participants. As a consequence, consumers tend to overestimate their real WTP. For that reason, this thesis investigates approaches to incorporate incentives into the traditional conjoint and choice methodologies. In this research, we analyze the “Calibrated Auction-Conjoint Valuation method” (CACM), by comparing Non-adjusted values from a self-explicated conjoint method to the final calibrated values entered using a non-hypothetical auction in a context well suited to the CACM: preferences for sustainable farming. We noticed that consumers significantly reduced their WTP when moving from the initial stage of the CACM to the final stage, primarily by placing less importance on product prices, implying that WTP values from a self-explicated conjoint method used alone would likely lead to overstated estimates of WTP. Finally, consumers’ willingness to pay and sensory “experience” is assessed through an experimental auction. Two auctions have been designed: the first consists on consumers’evaluation of different food options based on search attributes (before purchase) and the second after tasting it (simulating a post purchasing situation). In between a hedonic sensory test is performed. Simultaneously, as a complementary exercise, a trained panel sensory test has been employed to identify the main organoleptic characteristics that consumers associate with the hedonic taste satisfaction. Finally, factors affecting consumers’ WTP differences in the two auctions are analyzed. We have detected that the Spanish consumers have a positive attitude towards sustainable food due to environmental concerns, health concerns, and trust in certification and market agents. However, the premium they are willing to pay for these products is lower than the current market price. Furthermore, both “search” and sensory “experience” do influence consumers’ purchase behavior.
