Local vs. Organic: Does consumer personality matter?

Abstract

Recent studies analyzing consumer demand for locally grown products found out that consumers tend to value more local instead of organic food products and that sociodemographic and attitudinal factors can be sources of preference heterogeneity. More recently, Grebitus et al. ( 2013) demonstrated that personality traits affect consumers food choice behavior in both hypothetical (i.e., choice experiment) and non-hypothetical settings (i.e., real choice experiment and auctions). The present study investigates consumers’ preferences and WTP for a novel product (apple sauce) displaying both local and organic labels, while assessing whether personality traits can be sources of heterogeneity in consumers' valuation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the interaction between personality traits and consumers’ preferences for both local and organic food products simultaneously. In addition, while past studies used commonly or largely consumed food products, this study focuses on a product considered novel in the study area of interest (i.e., Italy). We used a Real (non-hypothetical) Choice Experiment to elicit consumers' WTP for locally produced and organic apple sauce, while, to capture how personality affects consumer valuation we implemented the MIDI (The Midlife Development Inventory) Personality Scale. Our results suggest that consumers are willing to pay a price premium both for locally produced and for organic apple sauce. They however revealed a higher WTP for the organic production attribute. Our results also suggest that personality traits are a source of heterogeneity in consumers' preferences.