On the Mechanics of the Organic Label Effect: How Does Organic Labeling Change Consumer Evaluation of Food Products?

András István Kun,Marietta Kiss

doi:10.3390/su13031260

Abstract

The literature on the effect of organic labels on consumers’ perception of food products has grown significantly over the last two decades. Since the number of empirical studies has also increased greatly, a literature review revealing the operational definitions of the organic label effect (OLE), which have evolved among researchers, has become necessary. Accordingly, in the current article, 82 studies are reviewed. It was found that studies cluster around two interpretations: they define the OLE either as a change in the evaluation of a given product or as a change in the evaluation of the difference between an organic and a conventional product resulted from organic labeling. We term the first approach the absolute OLE and the latter the relative OLE. Our analysis shows that, when applied separately, these two interpretations might lead to significantly different measurement results, but they can be merged into one concept. We argue that organic labeling affects not only the evaluation of products receiving the organic label but the evaluation of competing products without such a label as well. We reveal that the relative OLE is equivalent to the difference between the absolute effects of organic labeling on the labeled and on the unlabeled products.

Highlights

Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Debrecen, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary; Abstract: The literature on the effect of organic labels on consumers’ perception of food products has grown significantly over the last two decades
We scanned the papers for conceptual definitions of the organic label effect (OLE), and we found that none of the examined articles provided a clearly distinguished, explicit definition of what is meant by the OLE
Definitions definition type 2 (D2), definition type 3 (D3), and definition type 4 (D4) are built on the same basic idea and describe a practical approach to the relative organic label effect (ROLE), which is calculable as the difference between the AOLEO and the AOLEN (see Equation (4))

Summary

Introduction

Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Debrecen, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary; Abstract: The literature on the effect of organic labels on consumers’ perception of food products has grown significantly over the last two decades. Examinations of organically produced goods have gained great popularity in recent years (see, for example, Aschemann-Witzel and Zielke [1]; Hemmerling et al [2]; Romano et al [3]; Ezhilvani and Jayakumar [4]) One strand among these studies has dealt with the consumer evaluation of these goods and not with the products themselves. The literature dealing with the organic label effect has been continuously broadened with a growing number of results, only a small part of it deals with modelling this effect, with its mechanism, and with understanding what happens during the occurrence of the effect Exceptions to this are, for example, the studies of Larceneux et al [8] and Sörqvist et al [9], which explicitly aim to gain a better understanding of this mechanism.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion