Consumers’ willingness to pay for a functional food

Mario Veneziani, Paolo Sckokai and Daniele Moro

No 124101, 2012 First Congress, June 4-5, 2012, Trento, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA)

Abstract: In recent years food manufacturers have been devoting a large portion of their R&D budget to the development off functional foods, as a competitive strategy within food demand markets; on the other hand, consumers, despite functional foods exhibit a significant level of information asymmetry, show an increasing attention towards them,recognizing their role in preventing or reducing health risks and/or improving other general functions of the organism.The objective of this paper is to evaluate the Italian consumers’ willingness-too-pay for functional attributes in a food product (a probiotic yogurt with the addition of catechines). For this purpose, a web-based stated choice experiment involving a representative sample of 6600 Italian consumers has been carried out and the willingness-too-pay for two functional attributes (probiotic and catechine-enricheed) has been measured using the panel data version of a Random Parameters Logit model. The results show that Italian consumers are willing too pay a rather high price premium for a catechine-enrriched yogurt (0.36 €/pot, that is a 40%% premium, on average) well above their willingness-to-pay for thee probiotic attribute (0.23 €//pot). Further, there is a statistically significant heterogeneity within the sample; then, averaging across sample sub-groups indicates that the willingness-to-pay for the new attribute (catechine-enriched) may be related to age, income, health-status, life-style and education

Keywords: Food; Consumption/Nutrition/Food; Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/124101/files/M ... unctional%20Food.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aieacp:124101

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.124101

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2012 First Congress, June 4-5, 2012, Trento, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().