| The dropping consumer confidence in the safety of Genetically Modified (GM) food has caused Europe to change its food industry policies and also has led to this world's major food market firmly closed to GM-labeled food. However, it is noticed that European consumers do not share the same level of opposition against GM food across countries. This study is engaged to explore consumer purchase intention of GM food across European countries and the factors that affect their purchase intention.;Two approaches are sought for analyzing the categorical data: the classical frequentist approach and the Bayesian approach. With the classical generalized linear model, we found the factors that significantly affect consumer's purchasing intention, by how much and how different across countries. However, classical analysis do not allow for sampling variability in the parameters. Such shortcoming is remedied by applying the Bayesian analysis. With more philosophically sound foundation, the Bayesian analysis enables us to incorporate external empirical evidence into the results and to derive inference of the model parameters through the posterior distributions.;15 European countries' data are used in this project. The classic GLM analysis detects two groups of countries after controlling all other factors, one group contains countries with similar purchase intention as in Netherlands that has the highest proportion of consumers intending to buy GM food, and the other group contains countries with significantly different purchase intention. Two countries from each group are selected for further analysis. |
