Risk Perceptions and Preferences for Ethical and Safety Credence Attributes

This paper begins with a discussion of the public and private good aspects of consumer preferences for animal welfare, environmental sustainability and food safety attributes. Three Canadian consumer surveys incorporating discrete choice experiments that focus on different credence attributes, but explore similar notions of trust and perceptions of risk, are briefly outlined, along with a common multinomial logit (MNL) modeling framework. Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) estimates from the MNL analyses are then presented, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of consumer decision-making. Reprinted by permission of the American Agricultural Economics Association