Consumers' preferences for dairy products in alternative food store formats in China

China's emergence as the world's fastest growing economy during the last two decades has created incredible demand and a flourishing market for various agricultural products. China was once believed to be a serious threat to the world agricultural product markets; however, most researchers today believe that China does not threaten the world, but rather plays an important role in the world market. This situation creates unprecedented market and trade opportunities for potential agricultural product exporters outside of China, including the U.S.; This dissertation consists of three manuscripts, focusing on two separate but related issues that affect China's agricultural product markets. The first study centers on the modern food retail formats, supermarkets and hypermarkets, which have entered China and are spreading there as fast as (or faster) than anywhere in the world. The explicit objective of this study is to understand how Chinese consumers are responding to the entry and extension of these modern food retail formats, and to identify the underlying factors affecting this response. Different from most previous studies, the effects of potential interrelationships among different food retail formats on consumer choice for shopping termination are taken into account. The results of this study provided empirical evidence that encouraged us to start a long-term research plan to help develop and build markets in China for U.S. agricultural product exports.; The second and third manuscripts focus on another topic---dairy---which has been one of the fastest growing demands for agricultural products in China in recent years. In the second paper, fluid milk is assumed to be a homogenous product. The objective of the study is to understand current fluid milk consumption in urban China, and to identify the underlying determinants. A Tobit model was applied to estimate and test a series of hypotheses since the dataset involves zero-consumption observations. The homogenous product assumption in this paper was relaxed in the third study by designing a choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment, in which fluid milk is defined by a bundle of attributes and corresponding levels. This study jointly measures the effects of milk-specific attributes and individual-specific characteristics on consumers' preferences and purchasing behavior for fluid milk.