New Technology and Conflicting Information: Assessing Consumers' Willingness-to-Pay for New Foods

The aim of the book is to make the authors' scholarly research in the area of consumers' willingness-to-pay for new foods that have controversial attributes easily assessable to other researchers, students, and food policy makers. It addresses issues that arise in a market with conflicting information from interested parties, scientific sources, and the media. It begins with a discussion of research methods and information issues. These results include how consumers respond to food products that are produced with new technology that lowers farmers' costs of production, enhance nutrition and food safety for consumers, or adds variety to consumers' food choices. These results arise from data collected in a series of laboratory experiments on adult subjects at various sites in the US and consumer surveys worldwide. The data include socio-demographic attributes of subjects, and their revealed willingness-to-pay in auctions of experimental foods and food products under randomly assigned food labels and information treatments and contingent-valuation survey data.