Research On The Purchasing Behavior Of Pro-environmental Agricultural Products

The quality and safety of agro-products and the agricultural pollution issues need to be studied together due to the homogeneous cause as well as the mutually complementary governance.The scale of agricultural production in China is small and scattered.On the other hand,the regulatory resources and technologies are relatively limited.It is difficult to achieve satisfactory results solely using command-and-control instruments.Therefore,market-based policy instruments which focused on consumer purchasing behavior are of great importance to promote food safety control and agricultural pollution governance.The increasing demand of green products is anticipated to provide sufficient premium for producers to adopt cleaner production technologies,providing great benefit to food safety and sustainable environment.The eco-labeling can be regarded as an effective market-based policy instrument and consumers' willingness-to-pay(WTP)for related attributes is a vital indicator of the effectiveness of signaling mechanism.Firstly,this study analyzed the information asymmetry and signaling mechanism of pro-environmental agricultural products,emphasizing the great importance of consumers' WTP.Then it sorts out the development history,current situation and existing problems of green agricultural products and organic agricultural products in China.Secondly,the theoretical framework for pro-environmental purchasing behavior was constructed by integrating consumer trust into the motivation-cognition-opportunity(MOA)theory.With the help of choice experiment,the present study investigated the effects of different motives,pro-environment spillover,information induceness and consumer trust on the WTP for eco-friendly food while controlling for the impacts of knowledge and personal characteristics.Finally,a bivariate ordered probit model was used to examine the differences between consumers' willingness-to-pay and the actual buying and its obstructing factors,especially the role of consumer trust on the conversion of WTP to purchase behavior.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Consumers' perception about the attributes behind the eco-labels and their WTP directly affected the performance of the signaling mechanism.Although with rapid growth in China,the eco-labeled food still occupied a rather small share in food market.There is a noticeable difference with the developed countries.Based on the theoretical analysis and the actual condition,it is important to analyze consumer preference and willingness-to-pay for pro-environment products in order to stimulate green demand,providing economic incentives for the safer and more eco-friendly production.(2)Consumers have positive preference and WTP for eco-labels.Consumers who are willing to buy pro-environmental products are motivated by both health benefits as well as environmental considerations due to the higher consciousness of food safety and eco-environment in China.However,the healthy attributes tend to prevail in consumers' motivations.In addition,there exists heterogeneity in consumer preferences.Motivation,knowledge and income are the main factors influencing consumers' willingness-to-pay for eco-labels.(3)Both pro-environmental spillovers and information intervention have significant influence on consumer preference and WTP.Consumers with high involvement of pro-environment behaviors tend to show higher WTP for organic rice.Using recyclable plastic bags and sorting waste have the significant spillover effects on the willingness-to-pay for eco-labeled rice.People with high educational attainment and family income levels are more likely to adopt these behaviors.Meanwhile,consumers'willingness-to-pay for eco-labeled rice will increase with the information intervention.However,the effect of induced awareness is limited,which is only found to reinforce the already high preference for pro-environment products rather than creating such a preference.(4)Consumers have low trust in eco-labels,which is closely related to the trust on the relevant bodies in the certification system.Consumer trust will significantly affect consumer purchasing behavior.Consumers with higher degree of trust tend to pay more money for green or organic rice.Food safety motivation,subjective cognition and convenience of purchase have significantly positive impact on consumer trust.(5)Inconsistency between consumers' willingness-to-pay and actual purchasing behavior has been found.Despite the positive WTP,consumers would not necessarily buy the peo-environmental products if they do not think them are really "green" or"organic".Consumer trust plays an important role in the transformation of purchasing behavior.The contribution of this study is mainly reflected in the following:We emphasized the importance of consumers' WTP to stimulate green demand based on the theoretical analysis and the actual development of pro-environmental products;we try to decouple the effects of food safety concern and environmental consideration on the WTP in order to investigate the purpose for eco-friendly products and the value consumers place on pro-environmental attributes via the choice experiment;due to the positive role of environmental motivation,we also examine the impact of peo-environmental spillovers and information induceness on WTP simultaneously.;consumers' trust in eco-labels as well as related entities and its effect on WTP is analysed;a bivariate ordered probit model is applied to explore the differences between consumer willingness-to-pay and the actual purchase.More attention is paid to the leading role of consumer trust on the shift from WTP to actual buying.Thisstudy is conducive to a better understanding of the pro-environmental purchasing behavior and to provide economic incentives for safety and eco-friendly practices by producers.