Discounting Spotted Apples: Investigating Consumers' Willingness to Accept Cosmetic Damage in an Organic Product
By Chengyan Yue, Frode Alfnes, H. Jensen. Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 2006
122 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The appearance of organic produce is often less than perfect because of limited methods of avoiding plant diseases. We combine hypothetical and real auction mechanisms to investigate how cosmetic damage affects Consumers' willingness to pay for apples. We find that 75% of the participants are willing to pay more for organic than for conventional apples given identical appearance. However, at the first sight of any imperfection in the appearance of the organic apples, this segment is significantly reduced. Furthermore, the cosmetic damage has a larger impact on the willingness to pay for organic apples than for conventional apples.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a420057e13141278494a30d268a0a36303717be9
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Citations in the corpus
- Eliciting consumers' willingness to pay for organic and welfare-labelled salmon in a non-hypothetical choice experiment (2010, result): “This is also consistent with the results in other studies investigating consumer preferences toward organic products with inferior appearance (Thompson and Kidwell, 1998; Yue et al., 2009).”
- Consumer-Related Food Waste: Causes and Potential for Action (2015, background): “Consumers in general are willing to pay less for foods with visual imperfections compared to optimal foods, and this tendency is even stronger for organic foods compared to conventional foods [23].”