| This dissertation investigates consumer preferences for organic fresh produce. In 2002, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) implemented the National Organic Program (NOP), which, for the first, time provided national standards for claiming that a product is organic. While the organic label provides information to consumers, the certification program is highly complex, encompassing a wide range of production, processing, and handling considerations. For this reason, consumers are likely to form their own perceptions of what it means for a product to be organic and may evaluate organic products based on more, or potentially different, factors than those embedded in the official USDA definition. Hence, from an economics perspective, analyzing consumer preferences for organic products creates unique and interesting challenges. This three-essay dissertation investigates how various product characteristics, perceptions, and experiences conventional fresh produce. It preferences survey data, because people's preferences.;Essay 2 presents results from a choice experiment survey and decomposes econometrically the organic price premium into several key attributes; namely, absence of pesticide residues, no use of genetic modification, and environmental friendliness. People who report buying organic produce regularly are found to have significant positive willingness to pay (WTP) for all three attributes, whereas non-regular organic shoppers display significant WTP only for the absence of pesticide residues.;Essay 3 provides a unified conceptual framework for combining the panel scanner data with the choice experiment data, with a basis in theoretical models of impure public goods, impure altruism, and corner solution models, which lay the groundwork for future empirical implementation.;Essay 1 presents a flexible panel-mixed-nested-logit analysis of state dependence and preference heterogeneity effects in fresh produce choices, using actual shopping affect consumers' choices between organic and utilizes both real market transaction data and stated different data sources can yield different insights into records from a household-level scanner data set. The analysis reveals that both types of effect are significant, and that failing to control for one may yield spurious results for the other. Positive state dependence has important implications for the continued expansion of the future organic produce market. |
