A Study On Consumers’ Preference And Willingness To Pay For Quality And Safety Attributes Of Traceable Agricultural Products

The quality and safety of agricultural products are closely related to everyone’s life.The rapid development of economic globalization pushes people’s living standards towards high quality,and they pay more attention to the quality of life and their own safety and health.Therefore,consumers have stricter requirements on the quality and safety of agricultural products.The main source of agricultural product quality and safety problems is information asymmetry in agricultural product market,and traceability system,as a main management tool recognized and used by many countries,can effectively solve this problem.Because the traceability system can fundamentally prevent the safety risks of agricultural products,consumers can check the information of all links of the supply chain of agricultural products through the traceability system,protect the interests of consumers,and realize the responsibility traceability of problematic agricultural products,which can not only enhance the quality and safety of agricultural products,protect people’s life and health.It can also reduce the information asymmetry between agricultural producers and consumers to the greatest extent.Even so,agricultural product safety incidents continue to occur in recent years,indicating that the construction and development of China’s traceability system has not achieved the expected effect,and China’s agricultural product quality and safety policy has not produced an effective effect.The main reason is that the implementation of agricultural product traceability system in China has not taken into full consideration the demand of consumers’ preferences,and the government has not paid enough attention to consumers’ demands for relevant policies formulated by the government and information related to traceability quality certification.This paper takes traceable apple as an example to set four quality and safety attributes:traceable information,certification,place of origin and price.Based on the reality that the current quality and safety risks of Apple in China mainly occur in planting,processing,circulation and marketing,the information attributes can be traced.It is divided into "high-level traceable information includes apple planting,processing and circulation information and marketing information","middle-level traceable information includes apple planting,processing and circulation information","low-level traceable information only includes apple planting information" and "no traceable information".For the classification of quality certification attributes,on the basis of government certification,domestic third-party certification bodies,international third-party certification bodies and no certification are added;In terms of origin attribute,it can be divided into shaanxi,Xinjiang,Shandong origin and non-origin;In terms of price attributes,they are set as 6 yuan /0.5 kg,8 yuan /0.5 kg,10 yuan /0.5 kg and 12 yuan /0.5 kg respectively.Based on the survey of 481 consumers in Zhengzhou city,the empirical analysis is carried out by constructing the Mix Logit model through selecting experimental data.Based on the empirical analysis conclusions,targeted policy implications are proposed for traceability managers,traceability producers and traceability consumers.The main conclusions of the study are as follows: first,consumers show significant preference for each quality and safety attribute,but there are differences in preference degree and willingness to pay for each attribute.Among the attributes of traceability information,consumers have the highest preference and willingness to pay for high-level traceability information.Among the attributes of quality certification,the government certification is the most preferred and the most willing to pay.Among the origin attributes,shaanxi apples have the highest consumer preference and willingness to pay.Second,different types of consumer characteristics significantly affect consumers’ preference and willingness to pay for traceable apple’s quality and safety attributes.Mainly include consumer gender,age,education level,family monthly income and family population number.