Public Preferences and Private Choices: Effect of Altruism and Free Riding on Demand for Environmentally Certified Pork

Sales of private goods with affiliated public good attributes have markedly risen in recent years. This fact is difficult to explain within the paradigm of purely self-interested behavior. This paper investigates factors influencing consumer demand for pork products with certifications related to the environment, animal welfare, and antibiotics. Using psychometric scaling techniques, we measure individuals’ degree of altruism and propensity toward free riding. Results of a random parameter logit model applied to choice data obtained from a nationwide survey in the United States indicates that more altruistic individuals are willing to pay more for pork products with public good attributes than less altruistic individuals and free riders. These results indicate that private purchases of goods with public-good attributes are not simply a result of individuals’ perceptions of the ability to mitigate private risks such as food safety, but that individuals are making private choices to affect public outcomes. Results have implications for policy makers weighing the relative costs and benefits of food labeling policies versus bans related to certain livestock production practices.     

Public goods and the value of product quality regulations: the case of food safety

The paper examines preferences for product quality regulations. Our premise is that preferences for product quality regulations derive from preferences for both private and public goods. The model is used to explain public attitudes toward a referendum measure to eliminate pesticide residues on food. Results from a survey of consumers are consistent with the conceptual model and show that preferences for public goods influence support for the product quality regulation. The results help explain why consumption behavior is a poor predictor of political behavior, and have implications for methods that use voting and market behavior to value public goods.     

Organic food consumption in Europe: International segmentation based on value system differences

In this paper, we analyze the market for organic products in eight European countries, based on differences in their respective value systems. With a significant sample of 8014 consumers, we first identify international segments in the European organic products market using the Values Theory. Then we apply the Theory of Planned Behavior to examine how European consumers use attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control to form their purchase intention for organic products. Results show that subjective norms are the main underlying factor driving consumer behavior concerning these products. This effect is higher for the group of countries whose citizens score higher on Schwartz's value scale. In this segment of countries, people are more likely to be affected by what others think, which means that the best approach is to increase social awareness of the relevance of purchasing organic products. Organic products represent a potentially profitable opportunity for companies with an international horizon. Results are also useful for consumers and public administrations.     

景区产品经济属性及其供给

旅游景区分为自然景区和人文景区,不同的景区具有不同的经济属性.文章以公共产品理论为依据对景区产品的经济属性进行了分析,重点探讨了资源类景区产品的供给方式,提出政府应允许出让景区经营权,但要从市场准人、市场监管和市场服务与引导等三个方面对资源类景区投资进行规制的建议.     

网络平台企业免费产品相关市场界定与案例应用——以视频平台为例

平台企业对单边提供免费品，使基于价格变动的SSNIP测试法无法用于判断相关市场。本文以视频平台为例，基于Filistrucchi双边市场测试法，通过将SSNIP测试法中对一边市场的产品价格提升替代为广告时长的增加，改进了基于价格变动的假定垄断测试法，构建了网络平台企业免费产品的SSNDQ模型。在此基础上分析了加入会员收入的情况。主要结论是：（1）虽然传统的SSNIP测试法不适用于免费产品，但是影响用户“注意力”的变量“广告时长”能降低产品质量，是SSNIP测试法中价格的有效替代变量。本文证明了改进的SSNDQ测试法具有一般性，并给出了基于SSNDQ测试法的相关市场判断条件。（2）给出了界定网络平台免费产品相关市场的思路和分析框架、平台付费化趋势下免费产品与付费产品共存状态下的情形，并推导出不同利润差结果下判断平台用户不同行为及相关市场范围的条件。基于这一方法的测试为并购审查和反垄断认定，提供了依据和证据。     

Efficient black markets?

This paper investigates analytically the welfare effects of black-market activities that firms undertake to evade taxes. The desirability of a black market is linked to the attributes of the goods supplied by black-market firms. The analysis identifies cases where a black market reduces (increases) the distortionary impact of taxation on the allocation of resources across the goods that the government is attempting to tax, leading to a welfare gain (loss).     

Public provisions of professional services

Professional services are credence goods provided by certified experts (professionals). The most prominent examples of professional services are medical or legal services. Interestingly, the markets for such services are often subject to partial public provision: there is a low-end segment, where the services of basic quality are provided for free and professionals are reimbursed by the government, and a high-end segment, where free-market principles prevail. We examine the efficiency of this market structure. To this end we apply a modified version of the model of the market for goods with credence attributes proposed by Baron. We demonstrate that partial public provision can correct for the market failure caused by the credence good nature of professional services, even in the presence of regulation costs. The efficiency gain from partial public provision is due to a combination of quality and price effects.     

Measuring the Technological Structure of Chinese Imports

This paper uses the optimal partitioning method of clustering analysis using orderly samples to classify trade goods and analyzes the technological structure of Chinese imports. The results indicate that since 2000, medium–high technology products have made up the majority of China's imported goods, while the shares of medium or higher technology products have decreased and the share of medium–low technology products has increased sharply. The number of imported goods with a comparative advantage in the Chinese market decreased, while the overall comparative advantage of imported goods also declined. China imports different types of products from different countries and regions around the world. The findings suggest that China should increase the import scale of high technology products.     

Distal order effects in stated preference surveys

Stated preference researchers have previously demonstrated that a good's placement among a sequence of goods in a set of valuation questions (i.e. proximal order effects) can have a substantial impact on people's valuations of these different goods. However, the economic consequences of potential order effects stemming from other questions in a survey, prior to the valuation tasks, have received surprisingly little attention. Using an online climate change survey, we identify order effects created by prior attitude-elicitation questions, and we assess the potential impact of these distal order effects on willingness to pay (WTP) estimates for stylized climate change policies. We find that the order used in prior questions may change people's opinions toward various attributes of the good to be valued, and thereby change WTP by a substantial amount. This paper emphasizes the significance of order effects stemming from preliminary survey questions, and supports a call for diligence in the random ordering of all potentially influential preliminary information in stated preference surveys to minimize inadvertent effects from any single arbitrary ordering.     

A comparative study of environmental amenity valuations

The paper reports on a comparative study of direct and indirect approaches to valuing environmental amenities (i.e., public goods), specifically, air quality in terms of its human health effects. The application of three indirect valuation methods (via market goods) is reported here: the health production method, a consumer preferences (for nonmarket goods) model, and the cost of illness method. The first and second methods are (economic) behavior-based approaches where willingness to pay for an environmental good is derived by exploiting relationships in consumption between the public good and market good(s). The third method is based on a physical relationship—a dose-response function—between the environmental good and health. The direct valuation approach encompassed three contingent valuation elicitation formats: open-ended, modified iterative bidding game, and referenda-style binary choice. The application of all four methods was based on data from a survey of a large, stratified sample of households from the Haifa metropolitan area in northern Israel. The estimates of welfare change derived by the various methods are discussed and compared.     

Reconsidering Heterogeneity and Aggregation Issues in Environmental Valuation: A Multi-attribute Approach

The economic valuation of complex environmental goods (composed of multiple attributes) is an expanding field of research in ecological and environmental economics. However, several issues are still subjects of debate. This paper focuses on three of them: the linearity of the valuation function in the attributes; aggregation criteria for obtaining social values; and the heterogeneity of individuals’ utility functions. A methodological approach based on Multi-attribute Utility Theory, which enables us to contrast the impact of these concerns on the valuation of environmental goods, is proposed. We employ the methodology to value a protected natural area and, from the results obtained, we can conclude that the non-linearity and the heterogeneity of the individual utility function are relevant aspects of environmental valuation that need to be taken into account when valuing environmental goods.     

An econometric analysis of willingness-to-pay for sustainable development: A case study of the Vol?ji Potok landscape area

When the market for a certain good is competitive enough, economic activities can be studied by the market pricing mechanism. Because this is usually not feasible in case of environmental goods with embodied natural and cultural heritage, particular methods for economic valuation of such goods have to be applied. The present article represents the economic valuation of the Landscape Development and Protection Area of Vol?ji Potok, which is an important Slovenian cultural landscape area with internationally recognized qualities. For this purpose we combined classical contingent valuation with a closed-version of discrete choice method, where the protest responses have been removed. By using econometric analysis we obtained the value of willingness-to-pay and established its determinants. We also made an attempt to control for different biases that arise in such analyses. At last, we used the adjusted average individual value of willingness-to-pay to calculate the aggregate willingness-to-pay. The present analysis represents one of the very few applications of the method to Central and Eastern European countries.     

HOW ASSET IRREVERSIBILITY INFLUENCES THE INVESTMENT‐UNCERTAINTY RELATIONSHIP

This paper examines how uncertainty affects firms' investments for varying degrees of asset irreversibility (i.e., the wedge between purchase price and liquidation value of an asset). To identify more or less irreversible capital goods, we exploit unique survey data on German manufacturing firms over the sample period 2004 to 2012 in which managers provide information on investments' purpose (capacity expansion, replacement, restructuring, rationalization, and other). Our results indicate that only investments into the most irreversible capital goods (capacity expansion) will decrease if uncertainty rises. We also find support for other channels, such as the financial friction or the market power channel, to explain the investment‐uncertainty relationship.     

On price competition with complementary goods

We consider a duopoly industry with two separate firms each selling an indivisible product. The joint consumption of these goods has a specific value for the consumers which exceeds the mere addition of utilities when products are consumed in isolation: the higher this excess, the larger the complementarity between the goods. We analyse price equilibria in this market as related to the degree of complementarity existing between the two products.     

专业市场与产业集聚互动研究:来自浙江的案例

在规模报酬递增的行业,如果专业市场对该行业产品存在强需求,往往会导致同类企业在市场周边的集聚,同时集聚经济的形成使得企业能够为专业市场提供低价格的商品。与此同时,产品技术含量增加导致甄别商品质量的难度增加,由此造成的专业市场交易效率下降将降低对采购商和集聚区企业的吸引力,同时集聚区产业组织的变化促使领导型的企业绕开专业市场组织企业间的分工,并建立自身的产品营销体系。     

Management of non-timber forestry products extraction: Local institutions, ecological knowledge and market structure in South-Eastern Zimbabwe

Common-pool resources (CPRs), such as forests, water resources and rangelands, provide a wide variety of economic benefits to forest-fringe dwellers in semi-arid areas of southern Africa. However, the public nature and competition involved in the use of these goods, and weak enforcement of institutional arrangements governing their use may lead to resource degradation. Using survey data from four communities in south-eastern Zimbabwe for 2008 and 2009, this paper examines the extent to which forest degradation is driven by existing common property management regimes resource and user characteristics, ecological knowledge and marketing structure. A Principal Component Analysis indicates that the existence of agreed-upon rules governing usage (including costs of usage), enforcement of these rules, sanctions for rule violations that are proportional to the severity of rule violation, social homogeneity, and strong beliefs in ancestral spirits were the most important attributes determining effectiveness of local institutions in the management of CPRs. Empirical results from a regression analysis showed that resource scarcity, market integration, and infrastructural development lead to greater resource degradation, while livestock income, high ecological knowledge, older households, and effective local institutional management of the commons reduce resource degradation. The results suggest that there is need for adaptive local management systems that enhance ecological knowledge of users and regulates market structure to favour long-term livelihood securities of these forest-fringe communities.     

Environmental Product Differentiation and Environmental Awareness

In this paper, we have considered a duopolistic model of environmental product differentiation with two types of consumers (green and brown) to analyze how environmental awareness affects the environment. “Green” consumers value the physical and environmental attributes of the good they purchase while “brown” consumers only value the physical attributes. We find that more environmental awareness may not be good news for the environment as the firm that produces the good without environmental attributes may increase its sales. The result depends on the degree of product differentiation and the cost to achieve it. Social welfare can also be inversely related to environmental awareness if the negative environmental effect dominates the positive market effect.      

Distance Decay in the Willingness to Pay for Wine: Disentangling Local and Organic Attributes

This paper investigates how the residents of a French wine-producing region value the attributes of wine. We elicit the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for organic/non-organic and local/non-local wines with increasing levels of information on the impact of agricultural practices at both global and local scales. The analysis shows that there is a significant organic premium associated with both local and non-local wines. This organic premium significantly increases with information and significantly decreases with the distance between the consumer’s home and the vineyard. Based on the econometric predictions of the WTP, we show that a per-unit tax on non-organic wines or a standard imposing organic practices increases welfare through the internalization of the attributes revealed by the experiment.     

北京城镇居民对不同猪肉质量安全特征的消费偏好和支付意愿

利用针对北京市城镇居民的问卷调查数据,运用选择实验法,采用多元条件Logit模型实证分析了消费者对生鲜猪肉的不同质量安全特征的偏好和支付意愿。结果表明:对猪肉产品的不同质量安全特征进行标识有助于提高消费者的效用水平;北京市城镇居民对生鲜猪肉建立质量安全可追溯体系的偏好和支付意愿最高,其次是生鲜猪肉通过产品质量安全认证、柔嫩度较好,对生鲜猪肉具有无瘦肉精和兽药残留的质量安全标识的偏好和支付意愿最低。据此提出:中国应加强生鲜猪肉质量安全可追溯体系建设;政府监管部门应规范农产品质量安全标识的申请和使用行为,确保农产品生产者进行安全生产,确保质量安全标识制度的有效实施。     

The Production of Eco-Labels

Eco-labeling is a market-based technique for conveying information about consumers’ demands for environmental protection. Most criticisms of eco-labeling have concentrated on demand-side issues – the potential for firms or countries to use eco-labels to manipulate market power – and the difficulty of creating credible labels. In this paper, we argue that fundamental problems also arise on the production side. Specifically, we argue that both increasing returns to scale and complexities in production imply that it will be possible to market only a small percentage of environmental attributes through the use of eco-labels. We present evidence for our hypotheses from a detailed survey of 100 randomly-selected consumer products.