An Experimental Study Of Consumer Attitude Towards Gm Food

As Genetically Modified(GM) crops’ rapid development, it is facingmuch controversy. In the last two years, various transgenic events havepushed GM foods in disputes. It attracts consumers’attention on GM food.Consumers are the direct target of GM food. Government managementpolicies on GM food need to be based on the interests of consumers. Thus,a study of consumers’ attitude towards GM food is important togovernment policy making. Transgenic Accidents make consumers feelmore of the uncertainty of GM foods. Under this situation, whether there isa change in consumers’ attitude towards GM food is the main goal of thispaper.In order to achieve the research objectives of this paper, this paperhave a comparative study of two field experiments of five-year span. Weobserve consumers’ willingness to pay for GM food, by setting a GM foodand non-GM food auction experiment. Their payment difference towardsthe two kinds of food can reflect their attitude towards GM food. Bycomparing the difference between two experiments, we can know whetherthere is a change of consumer attitude towards GM food. Then we try toanalyze the reason of this change from the factors that can affect consumerattitudes towards GM food. In these factors, we added risk aversion factor.In order to study risk aversion’s effect on GM food’s consumption attitude,we added a lottery choice stage in the new experiment. The results of this paper show that consumers awareness of GM foodis rising over time. However, they are still not very familiar with GM foods.Consumers’ acceptance of GM foods has significantly decreased. Riskaversion doesn’t show significant relevance with consumers’ attitudestowards GM food. The main reason for the change of consumer attitude isthat consumers see food safety much more important, while the transgenicevents make consumers see the uncertainty of GM food. Finally, based onthe finding, combining with other countries’ management policies on GMfood, this paper makes a few suggestions with China’s management policy.