Study On The Consumption Behavior Of Organic Food

In recent years,the domestic food safety incidents frequently,the environmental pollution problem is outstanding.The prominent environmental problem further induces the problem of food safety.For example the environmental pollution caused by agricultural production not only affects the natural environment,but also this kind of pollution will lead to pesticide residues in agricultural products,heavy metals and so on,which will directly threaten the public's consumer safety and human health.These issues have aroused widespread concern in the community,the public's awareness of food safety will continue to enhance.At the same time,along with the rapid development of economy,the public's living standards rising,food consumption demand are changed significantly,the pursuit of healthy and high quality organic food has become a trend gradually.However,due to the organic food market in China start late(1990s),China's organic food market is small at present,the total organic food consumption is less than 1% of the total food consumption market.Moreover,consumer groups are mainly concentrated in large cities,small cities are rare,the vast rural areas is almost no organic food sales records.In view of this,it is necessary to take effective measures to accelerate the development of domestic organic food market.While,develop the organic food market is inseparable from organic food consumption.To promote the consumption of organic food will need to clarify organic food consumption behavior characteristics and its influencing factors.Then,what's the current situation of consumers' perception of organic food in China? What are the willingness to pay for organic food and what are the buying behavior characteristics? What kind of impact will the two subjective factors about consumer's confidence and the degree of food safety concerns produce on organic food purchase behavior? How will information asymmetry in the market of organic food affect the purchase of organic food? These are the main issues of this paper.Based on reviews of the literature on organic food consumption behavior at home and abroad,with preference theory,consumer behavior theory,system dynamics theory,information asymmetry theory as a guide,this paper studies organic food consumption behavior qualitatively and quantitatively by inductive method,questionnaire,econometric analysis,equilibrium analysis,comparative analysis and system dynamic simulation analysis,etc.Firstly,based on the induction of related theory,designing a theoretical analysis framework,as the theoretical basis of this paper;Secondly,through the statistical analysis of field survey data,analyzing the organic food cognitive level of consumers,willingness to pay and buying behavior characteristics;Again,by choosing the organic food consumers scale index and building a system dynamics model,to analysis the affect of consumer trust and food safety concern degree on the buying behavior of organic food;Then,exploring the influence of organic labeling and mislabeling on the buying behavior of organic food,from the perspective of information asymmetry;Finally,on the basis of the above research giving some countermeasures and suggestions.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Most consumers in the sample area not only pay much attention to the food safety problem,but also consider the problem of food safety in our country is worrying.Consumers are very concerned about the health of their own,have strong health awareness.Consumers concerned about the issue of food safety,the improvement of their health consciousness,will undoubtedly enhance the consumption tendency about the health,safety,high quality organic food.Therefore,the current market environment is conductive to the promotion of consumer choice of organic food consumption.However,the current consumers don't know much about the properties of organic food,the level of understanding of organic certification mark and certification body is low.This means that,consumer awareness is not enough for organic food,lack of enough understanding about the organic food,to some extent hindered the organic food consumption.(2)In the sample area,most consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic food,which reflects the potential consumption propensity of consumers for high quality organic food.But the premium level that consumers willing to pay is low,generally less than 200% of premiums;currently,on the market,most of the organic food actual selling price is generally higher than ordinary food of 200%-400%.To this end,between consumers willing to pay and the actual level of organic food price existing significant deviations,which make the current consumption of organic food face greater resistance.The analysis about organic food purchasing behavior characteristics found that the most organic food category which consumers buy is organic vegetable,followed by organic milk and organic fruit.The prime cause of purchasing organic food is that consumers believe that organic food is healthier than ordinary food,while the main factor that hinders the purchase of consumers is ‘price is too high'.(3)Organic food purchasing behavior will be affected by subjective factors about the level of consumer confidence from the organic certification and government regulation offood safety,and consumer food safety concerns.With the rising of consumer confidence level of organic certification and consumer concern about food safety,consumers food safety consciousness increasing,making consumers will actively look for and consume more safe food.Therefore,there will be more to more consumers actively make buying organic food decisions,making the scale of organic food consumer groups accelerated expansion.However,the impact of the level of consumer confidence in government regulation of food safety on organic food buying decisions is faint.(4)Information asymmetry problem in the organic food market on the one hand to promote the introduction of organic labeling policy,on the other hand to induce the mislabeling.Introducing labeling policy in information asymmetry food market will affect organic food consumers' utility differently.For consumers with lower quality preferences,the introduction of the organic labeling policy would make the utility obtained from organic food consumption reduction;For consumers with higher quality preferences,the introduction of the organic labeling policy would make the utility derived from organic food consumption increase.The mislabeling induced by information asymmetry caused a significant negative impact on organic food consumption.The mislabeling make the utility of consumers from the organic food consumption decrease,and the consumer utility will reduce more with the increasing of the probability of the occurrence of label fraud.At the same time,the mislabeling will undermine consumers' confidence in the organic food system.The reducing of utility and trust will make consumers buy less or don't buy organic food,which led to the organic food market share shrinking.In addition,since the green food exist,so that the consumption behavior of organic food under the information asymmetry is also affected by the price of green food,consumption utility enhance factor of green food,and probability of the mislabeling occurred in the green food market.