Consumers’ Purchase Behavior And Willingness To Pay To Organic Foods And Its Determinants

With the growth in the living standard and food safety problems being more and more serious, the consumers’demand in food consumption is getting higher, and then organic food begins to step into the views of consumers. Compared with the organic food consumption condition abroad, the organic consumption demand is obviously insufficient in China. Maybe this gap is related to the underdeveloped organic market, while the relationship between this gap and consumers’poor consumption consciousness is can not be ignored. So this paper studies the consumers’purchase behavior and willingness to pay for the organic food and the determinants of WTP.This paper takes consumers in Wuhan as research object, and the research contents are including consumers’cognitive, attitude, purchase behavior and willingness to pay to organic food. Consumers’food consumption motives, planed behavior, lifestyle and characteristics are introduced in the study as well. This paper builds a theoretical framework of organic food consumption firstly, then designs the questionnaire based on the former framework, and makes an investigation and dose quantitative analysis at last. During the questionnaire designing, this paper gets consumers’WTP by contingent value method. This method introduce four characteristics of organic food and different levels of these characteristics are combined each other to be nine conditions, which consumers should give an WTP to. The emphasis of this paper is the affecting factors of WTP which studied by building econometric model.The result shows that consumers’knowledge about organic food is not rich, and attitude and trustrank are neutrality; although the percentage of consumers having bought organic food is low, large part of the consumers having not bought have purchase intention; the reason of consumers not buying organic food is that their knowledge is poor; the varieties of organic food and the channels to buy are few; consumers’WTP to organic food is low; consumers’characteristics, knowledge and attitude, consumption motives, planed behavior and information conditions are the determinants of WTP. This paper shows the following enlightenments:controlling the production cost and adjusting price of organic food are helpful to its development; organic food salesman can adopt price discrimination to get a larger sale volume; popularity and publicity of the organic knowledge are very important; organic food producer and salesman emphasizing the advantage of organic food can increase consumers’purchase intention; the government should supervise the organic market strictly and prevent the fake products from entering into the organic market.