Empirical investigation on the determinants of organic food purchasing behavior

Date

2019

Author

Dinç Cavlak, Özge

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The main motivation of this thesis is to reveal the determinants of organic food purchasing behavior of individuals by improving a psychological model and try to elicit individuals’ willingness to pay estimates for each attribute of organic foods in an experimental setting. In the first essay, we aim to reveal the determinants of organic food purchasing behavior within the Theory of Planned Behavior framework, and the basic model is extended by incorporating food safety concern, health consciousness, trust, and organic knowledge as background factors using Structural Equation Modeling. The utility of the extended model is mainly confirmed in understanding individuals’ organic food purchasing behavior. The addition of food safety concern, health consciousness, trust, and organic knowledge is proven to improve the predictive power of the model and increase the proportion of explained variance in behavior. In the second essay, we aim to elicit individuals’ willingness to pay estimates for the attributes of organic foods by conducting an experimental approach. The willingness to pay estimates of individuals are compared with using three elicitation methods, namely, a conventional non-hypothetical choice experiment, a non-hypothetical choice experiment with BDM (Becker-DeGroot-Marschak) treatment, and the BDM mechanism in which individuals’ reservation prices are elicited. Willingness to pay estimates are calculated by using Multinomial Logit Model and Tobit Model. The findings indicate that the willingness to pay estimates of the conventional non-hypothetical choice experiment and the non-hypothetical choice experiment with BDM treatment do not significantly differ while the BDM mechanism in which individuals’ reservation prices are directly elicited differs from those two methods, and gives more truthful estimations.

Subject Keywords

Purchasing., Natural foods., Market surveys., Consumer behavior., Consumers' preferences., Structural equation modeling.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622925/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27901

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis