Data Mining in Evaluating the Impact of Perceived Trust in the Consumption of Safe Foods in Vietnamese Households: The Case of Vegetables in Hanoi

Abstract

Food safety is as much of a concern to Vietnamese citizens as it is to the public authorities. As safe vegetables are classified as credence goods, the markets of which exhibit a high level of information asymmetry between the buyers and the suppliers. As such, making the market for safe vegetables become more transparent and grow sustainably is a must, but not an easy task. In this paper, we use a Kernel regression method to discover the main determinants of consumers’ decisions for the consumption of “safe” vegetables with more focus on perceived levels of trust. The result shows that apart from other traditional factors, perceived trust is an important determinant of consumers’ decisions. However, the data shows that consumers put more trust in un-verified factors such as “store’s reputation” or “label” and much less on formal factors such as “government certificates”. This result raises some alarm as other studies show that without trusted involvement from the Government, signals from suppliers, such as labeling are not reliable.