Empirical Study Of Chinese Organic Food Market Based On The Perspective Of Consumer Behavior

"Oil-agriculture" achieves great results in eliminating agricultural poverty, increasing food supply, while also bringing more serious negative effects. In this context, the organic food has attracted great attention and becomes a subject of hot debates among politicians, scholars and the public as well.This paper's research objectives are to examine the deep-seated reasons that hinder organic food consumption, to reveal the inherent mechanism and the basic laws of market operation mechanism of organic food and to provide policy basis for promoting healthy development of the domestic organic food market. Based on the research objectives, in this paper, firstly, the relevant literatures and theories are reviewed and the consumption and market of organic food are theoretically researched, it is thought that many different features of organic food from the ones of conventional food lead to very different market performance of organic food from that of conventional food, which broadens the theoretical perspectives of study and provides solid theoretical support for this paper; then, empirical study is launched from the micro and macro levels respectively to seek realistic basis for exploring how to promote China's organic food consumption and market development: (1) At the micro level, organic food consumers'behavior, especially the consumers'trust propensity and evaluation for organic food is studied, which constitutes the core and focus of this study. This study is carried out through constructing a consumer behavior model as an analysis framework, using conducting surveys as the main research means and qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, variance analysis, joint analysis and Logit analysis etc. as the research tools, along the main line of consumers'awareness of organic food, purchase motivation, effectiveness evaluation, purchase willingness and the influencing factors; (2) At the macro level, a comprehensive study on development of organic food at home and abroad is made and the scale of China's organic food market is predicted according to the EU market experience by building a double logarithmic demand model. Finally, on the basis of the above studies, conclusions are refined and policy recommendations are provided from the enterprises and governments levels respectively.The main conclusions of this paper are: (1) Changes in demand for organic food often lead to significant market volatility, while the impact on market by changes in supply is more relaxed because of the significant differences in supply and demand elasticity of organic food and conventional food. (2) Environmentally friendly, safe and healthy features of organic food lead to market failure in externalities, public goods and asymmetric information areas, which impedes the expansion of its consumer market; (3) Chinese consumers'awareness of the organic food is relatively low, the proportion of organic food expenditure over the total food expenditure is also low, effectiveness evaluation for the organic food is also lower than that on the conventional and green food; (4) Income, price and confidence are the main factors influencing consumers'buying behavior. Under the current situation, Chinese consumers'confidence in organic food is obviously missing; (5) Consumers'environmental awareness, concerns on food safety and buying experience are the significant factors influencing their evaluation for organic food certification. Based on the above conclusions, it becomes crucial for the development of organic food that an effective and credible organic food certification system is built to improve consumers'confidence.The main innovation of this paper is that the intrinsic characteristics of consumers'behavior and the market formation mechanism of the organic food are analyzed systematically and completely in China. Details are as follows: The inherent mechanism and the basic laws of market operation and consumption of organic food are theoretically researched and empirically analyzed through seizing the essential characteristics of organic food and using the principles of economics, which enrich the theory of consumer behavior with Chinese characteristics. Examine the deep-seated reasons that hinder organic food consumption through constructing a consumer behavior model and using a variety of research methods such as variance analysis, joint analysis and Logit analysis etc. along the main line of consumers'awareness of organic food, purchase motivation, effectiveness evaluation, purchase willingness and the influencing factors; The consumers'trust propensity and evaluation for organic foods are analyzed and the influencing factors are studied through constructing a multi-Logit Model in order to provide solutions to break the bottleneck of the development of the organic food market--lack of consumers'confidence.