A measurement of the quality of orange-juice consumption

Abstract

Theil's index of quality of consumption was used to measure the quality of orange-juice products. A change in the quality of a group of goods is defined as the covariance between the goods' income elasticities and logarithmic quantity changes. Over the sample from 1988 to mid 1999, the quality index for orange juice products was estimated to increase by about 50%. Decomposition of the change in quality showed that most of the increase resulted from strong demand trends. Income, prices, and advertising, each, had largely offsetting positive and negative impacts on quality over the sample. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.