Consumers' Preferences For Different Safety Certified Foods

Being closely related with people’s lives and safety, economy development andsocial harmony and stability, food safety has gradually become an international issue.At the same time, the remarkable panic buying of Chinese consumers from theoverseas in2010indicate that market failure caused by information asymmetry makeChinese consumers’ food safety risk perceptions have been in a high level. Economicsthink that consumers’ preference is the logistic start point for the development ofsafety food market. Study on consumers’ preference in safety certification foodmarket is the key to promote the market development in a regulated way. Scholarsboth in domestic and abroad pay high attention on the effective measurement andevaluation of consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for safety certification food. Basedon Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the thesis try to develop a research frameworkof consumers’ WTP for safety certification food and its affecting factors.In that case, based on a sample data of560consumers in Jinan and other fivecities in Shandong province, take milk as an example and study consumers’preferences on safety certification, such as Organic Certification Label, GreenCertification Label, and Hazard free Label, using Choice Experiment (CE), and thenanalyze the preference difference on the above attributes of groups with differentconsumer food safety risk perceptions. The findings show that the OrganicCertification Label become the most important attribute in determing consumerpreference besides price, food safety risk perceptions survey show that consumershave a high degree of risk perceptions. In general, the higher the risk perceptions, thehigher the willingness to pay for the safety certification, however, different foodsafety risk perceptions groups vary a lot in their utility of safety certification.