Linking Consumers’ Food Choice Motives to their Preferences for Insect‐based Food Products: An Application of Integrated Choice and Latent Variable Model in an African Context

Consumers’ attitudes, perceptions, personalities and motives play important roles in shaping their food choices. These factors are not fully observed by analysts, so they should be treated as latent variables. A number of economic studies treat such variables as direct measures of consumers’ food choice behaviour, even though this might introduce measurement error and endogeneity bias. We investigate the latent link between consumers’ preferences and food choice motives (FCMs) in an African context. We use an integrated choice and latent variable (ICLV) model specification for data analysis to recognise the latent nature of the FCMs and address the measurement and bias problems. The data originate from an incentivised discrete choice experiment conducted in Kenya to elicit consumers’ preferences for insect‐based foods. Our findings show that consumers’ preferences and choices are influenced by their latent motivational orientation. The results illustrate the benefit of the ICLV approach in accounting for consumers’ latent preference constructs in food choice and valuation research.     

The relationship between the firm's social media strategy and the consumers' engagement behavior in aviation

Social media platforms constitute a new frontline for brands to build relationships with their customers. Nevertheless, the literature on social media engagement behavior is unidimensional, as it focuses on customer engagement while neglecting the customer's influence on managerial decisions. The current paper goes a step further by applying the theory of the marketing firm (TMF). We investigated consumer-firm bilateral contingencies through three studies. The first study captures up to 60% of the variance in consumer responses given on Icelandair's Facebook page. The second study shows how customers engage with Icelandair's social media platforms. The third study illustrates the firm's social media strategy from a managerial perspective.     

Attending to the Reasons for Attribute Non-attendance in Choice Experiments

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance in choice experiments. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that valid preference information may indeed be elicited in these cases, and we illustrate how recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on stated reasons may be a more appropriate solution than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account.     

Experience and Learning with Improved Technologies: Evidence from Improved Biomass Cookstoves in Ethiopia

Environmental and Resource Economics - This paper provides field experiment-based evidence that user experience and learning can increase the attractiveness of an important new cooking technology...