What Is the Willingness to Pay for a Basket of Agricultural Goods? Multi-Features of Organic, Animal Welfare-Based and Natural Products with No Additives

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to construct a model by combining the theory of planned behavior (TPB) with conjoint analysis to evaluate baskets of agricultural goods. Each basket of agricultural goods contains various different products, including white rice and leaf vegetables are either organic or non-organic, hens’ eggs and chicken drumsticks obtained from chickens bred with and without due consideration for animal welfare, and soy sauce and jam with or without additives. The evaluation of these various features is innovative and in accordance with the shopping behavior of most consumers who, most of the time, concurrently evaluate these multi-features and multi-products. The price premium for each feature and the willingness to pay, the highest amount that a consumer is willing to pay, for a specific basket of agricultural goods is evaluated by using the multinomial logit model and the linear regression model. The relationship between essential factors in the TPB and the sociodemographic characteristics of consumers is examined. In general, the ranking of the price premium paid for products from the highest to the lowest is soy sauce, jam, chicken drumsticks, white rice, hens’ eggs, and leaf vegetables, respectively. The price premium for natural products with no additives is higher than that for organic and animal welfare-based products. The evaluation of these multi-features of agricultural goods allows us to observe the relative importance of an agricultural product through the price premium, with different combinations of other products. This indicates that the evaluation of the price premium for only a single product or for multiple products with a single feature might be either over-estimated or under-estimated.