A Study On Consumers’ Perception And The Willingness To Pay For The GM Foods

According to data released by the Ministry of Agriculture,there are soybeans, corn, rapeseed and cotton which have been the implementation of identity management. That means some farmer produce sold in national market contain the transgenic composition and the consumers have consumed these unconsciously. In many conditions, the consumption is passive. The consumers can’t distinguish the difference between the GM foods and non-GM foods which have no enough information about it. The kind of the GM foods, which have been implementation of identity management is just the transgenic soybean oil. Though there is a marker outside the package of the transgenic soybean oil, it is not clearly so that it can’t attract the attention of the consumers. The studies show that the cognition level of the consumers in the city of Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is very low. And there is no the relevant study on the northern of China so that we don’t know the situation in the northern of China. Under this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the cognition situation and the willingness to pay for the GM foods in the city of Jilin.This paper is basic on the studies which have done and the theories of the consumer cognition, the consumer behavior. The questionary of the investigaton is about the cognition and the willingness to pay for the transgenic soybean oil. The paper analyzed the effect of the cognition and willingness to pay for the GM foods using the binary logistic model and calculate the actual willingness to pay for the transgenic soybean oil using the utility function. The results show that the factors of the gender, age, the purchasing habit, he ability of distinguishing the mark of the transgenic soybean oil and the place which the consumers choose to buy have the effect on the perception. And the factors of the approval, the security awareness, income, the confidence degree on the government have effect on the willingness to pay. On this basis, the paper uses the utility function to calculate the price which the consumers’willingness to pay. And the results show that the price now is higher than the consumers’willingness to pay. At last, the paper the suggestions.There are seven chapters in the paper.The first chapter is the introduction. The second chapter is the literature summarizing. The third chapter is the basic of the theory, which introduced the theory of the consumer cognition and the consumer behavior. The forth chapter is the source of the data, which introduced the procedure of the investigation. The fifth chapter is descriptive analysis, which analyzed the situation of the cognition and willingness to pay.The sixth chapter is empirical analysis, which analyzed the effect of the cognition and the willingness to pay for the transgenic soybean oil using the binary logistic model. Then based on the above research, the paper used the statistic method and the utility function to calculate the actual willingness to pay for the transgenic soybean oil. The seventh chapter is the results and the suggestions, which based on the sixth chapter, giving the suggestions according to the results.