Urban Consumers’ Preference And Its Heterogeneity For Milk With Carbon Footprint Label

With the increasing threat of global warming to the ecological environment and human health,people are beginning to pay more and more attention to the impact of food consumption on the environment.Developing low-carbon products and guiding consumers to implement low-carbon consumption has become an effective measure to reduce carbon emissions.Carbon labels are becoming increasingly popular as a label that conveys information on product greenhouse gas emissions to consumers and guides them to implement low-carbon consumption.Consumers,as the final demand side of low-carbon products,their acceptance of low-carbon products will be the basis for the development of products with low-carbon footprint label.Understanding the preference and the willingness to pay(WTP)of urban consumers for low-carbon agricultural products and the preference heterogeneity is of great significance for the government to formulate carbon label policies,for companies to make low-carbon production decisions and for country to achieve carbon emission reduction targets.Therefore,this article is guided by EKB model,random utility theory,Lancaster’s theory of consumer demand and asymmetric information theory,based on a data of786 urban milk consumers in Shanghai,Nanjing and Hangzhou,this paper adopted the choice experiment method to explore the preference and WTP of two types of consumer groups that usually buy long-shelf-life milk or fresh milk for carbon footprint labeled milk by the mixed Logit model.Results indicate that: when consumers understand the basic meaning of carbon footprint label,both types of consumer groups have a significant positive preference for milk with low-carbon and medium-carbon footprint label,and there is a complementary relationship between low-carbon footprint label and whole milk label.In addition,the average WTPs for milk with low-carbon footprint label from consumer group that usually buys long-shelf-life milk and from consumer group that usually buys fresh milk were 4.13yuan/250 ml and 5.63 yuan/250 ml respectively.The average WTPs for middle-carbon footprint label were 2.73 yuan/250 ml and 2.11 yuan/250 ml respectively.Furtherly,the preferences of two consumer groups for milk with carbon footprint label are heterogeneous.The specific performances are as follows: the long-shelf-life milk consumers with younger age,higher monthly income prefer to buy milk with a low-carbon footprint label;while fresh milk consumers with being a male,younger age,and the higher the awareness of the harm of global warming prefer to buy milk with low-carbon footprint label.Finally,consumers’ perception of the role of low-carbon agricultural products positively influences their low-carbon preference in both consumer groups.Therefore,this paper suggests that the government and relevant institutions should strengthen the promotion of carbon footprint label,popularize knowledge about low-carbon agricultural products to consumers and improve the low-carbon agricultural products certification system.From the business perspective,they should focus on low-carbon market segmentation.