13 pages, In Ghana, groundwater, accessed through wells and boreholes, is generally unregulated and may be contaminated with pollutants including excess nitrates from agricultural chemical fertilizers. Yet, studies estimating how clean groundwater is valued are not available in Ghana. In addition, some research suggests that the pre-experiment information provided to survey respondents affects their valuation of an identical outcome. This paper estimates smallholder farmers’ preferences for groundwater protection using pre-experiment information focused on one of two outcomes: environment or health. The double-bounded contingent valuation (DBCV) approach is used to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) to protect groundwater quality. The estimation accounts for shift and anchoring effects, which are common issues with the DBCV method. The mean WTP from the health (environmental) information subsample is about US$19 (US$17) per acre, and the values are significantly different between the information conditions. The findings shed light on the importance of using precise information in eliciting WTP in a developing country setting.
24pgs, Increasingly, the health claims made by food products focus on the marketing of specific molecular enrichments. Research exploring consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for health claims assumes that individuals hold perfect information on the benefits of the enrichment, and that their valuations depend solely on whether or not they need to improve their health. While health interventions are aimed at individuals at higher health risk, consumers may be unaware of the health risks that they face, limiting the effectiveness of a generic targeting strategy. Using an orthogonal experimental design, we explore the impact of two factors on the WTP for vitamin D enrichment in eggs: whether the information is person-specific or generic; and the presence of a health claim explaining the vitamin D enrichment. Results indicate that it is the provision of information, not the health claim, that influences WTP. Both generic and personalised information lead to similar increases in the WTP for vitamin D enrichment. While we only observe a direct effect of generic information on the WTP for vitamin D enrichment, personal information may also operate by increasing the perceived risk of vitamin D deficiency. Our results support the use of personalised health information during the choice task as a means of increasing the sales of healthy products.
15pgs, Research has suggested to not solely include cognitive processes but also affective processes in economic choice modeling. Studying Medjool dates, we conducted a laboratory experiment combining choice experiments and eye-tracking to account for cognitive processes. In addition, participants indicated their level of worry related to production practices to account for affective processes. Our results show that consumers worry more about pesticide residues than genetic modification in foods. They also pay more attention to labels related to these production practices compared to other labels; and the production practice labels received the highest willingness to pay (WTP). Results from linear regressions show that both cognitive and affective processes are associated with WTP. Especially in the full model for WTP for pesticide-free labeling an increase of attention by 1 s increases WTP on average by $0.10 and an increase of the level of worry from one category to the next increases WTP on average by $0.17. Overall, results show that including both cognitive and affective processes as explanatory variables is important when determining factors associated with WTP.
