Consumer Preferences And Interaction Effects Of Certification Labels And Brands: A Food Safety Perspective

In 1995,China promulgated and began to implement the Food Hygiene Law.Since then,our government has continuously improved the supervision and management of food safety.Although a lot of achievements have been made,the overall situation of food safety has also been significantly improved.But food safety accidents are still common.Especially since 2008,food safety accidents in China have been reported frequently,the frequency is really rare.Market failure caused by information asymmetry has become the key cause of food safety problems.In general,the certification label of food safety helps to reduce the information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers,which becomes an effective means for suppliers to transmit some food quality information to consumers.This paper comprehensively and systematically reviews the current literature on food safety certification labels and brands.This paper takes tomato as the research object,and divides the certification label attributes into organic label,green label and pollution-free label,and brands into enterprise production brand and professional cooperative brand.With the method of questionnaire to collect consumer sample data from Rizhao City and other nine cities in Shandong Province.Firstly,the BDM auction experiment is used to study the consumers’ willingness to pay and the influencing factors of certified label attributes(organic label,green label and pollution-free label)and brand attributes(professional cooperative brand and enterprise production brand).Secondly,the interaction between the two attributes of authentication label and brand is studied by menu selection experiment.In the experiment,this paper constructs two versions of the experiment,one version is not to provide the interviewees with any information about the certification label attributes before the experiment,and the other version is to provide consumers with information about the three certification label attributes before the experiment.The results show that:(1)consumers are generally willing to pay higher prices for certified tomatoes(especially organic tomatoes)and brands(especially those produced by enterprises).The provision of certification knowledge could significantly improve consumers’ willingness to pay for organic and green tomatoes,but had no significant influence on the willingness to pay for pollution-free tomatoes.(2)consumers’ willingness to pay for certification and brand tomatoes is generally affected by consumers’ individual characteristics,awareness or trust.(3)although the average price of organic label attribute is set to the highest,it still has the highest selection frequency.The interviewees choose the brand attribute of enterprise production much more frequently than the brand attribute of cooperative;The provision of certification knowledge has significantly increased the selection frequency of organic and green labels over that of brands produced by enterprises.(4)there is a significant two-way substitution relationship between green label and organic label;When certification knowledge is not provided,the relationshipbetween pollution-free label and organic label,and between pollution-free label and green label is a significant two-way substitution relationship.If certification knowledge is provided,the relationship becomes a one-way substitution relationship.(5)the organic label(or green label)cannot replace the enterprise brand,and the enterprise brand has substitution effect on the organic label(green label);There is a bi-directional substitution relationship between pollution-free label and enterprise brand.The government should encourage agricultural product manufacturers to improve the construction of China’s quality certification system through the government or third-party certification,and strengthen the publicity of food safety certification labels and agricultural product professional cooperative brands,so as to improve consumers’ awareness level.The government should support manufacturers to produce tomatoes with multiple attribute combinations to meet the heterogeneity of consumers,and manufacturers should dynamically adjust the production and sales strategies of tomatoes with different attribute combinations according to consumer preferences,so as to improve the social welfare of producers and consumers.The innovation of this paper lies in the following:(1)the attributes of agricultural products are refined,and the attributes of tomatoes are divided into two major attributes-safety certification label and brand,so as to study consumers’ willingness to pay from multiple levels.(2)combine the auction experiment and menu selection experiment tentatively to study consumers’ willingness to pay for agricultural products certification labels and brand attributes and the interaction between these attributes.It provides the basis for grasping the real demand of consumers for various internal attributes of agricultural products,and provides a specific and more practical development direction for the future development of agricultural products.