Consumers’ Food Safety Risk Perception of and Consumption Decision-making Behaviour

Abstract

In recent years, the frequent occurrence of food safety incidents has brought great impact on consumers’ confidence in food safety, which has caused the food problem to become an important livelihood issue that needs to be improved and solved. The essence of food safety incidents is the market failure caused by the asymmetry of food safety information. Therefore, by taking the food safety as object of study, this paper firstly adopts the questionnaire research method to investigate the consumer’s food safety risk perception. Besides, according to the theories such as consumer behaviour decision-making and asymmetric information etc., the model of consumer decision-making behaviour based on a rational model was constructed, and the factors that affect consumer decision-making behaviour were studied. The results show that consumers are more concerned about the safety issues of food quality, but the satisfaction of the government’s supervision and food producer’ control on food quality is not high; consumers’ information recognition of food safety, risk perception, and consumer’s expectation all will directly or indirectly affect consumer decision-making behaviour. Finally, it proposes the suggestions and countermeasures for improving China’s food safety supervision as well as strengthening consumers’ food safety awareness, which is expected to help reduce consumer perception of food safety risks and restore their confidence in food safety.