Measuring consumer heterogeneous preferences for pork traits under media reports: choice experiment in sixteen traceability pilot cities

The absence of original information in traceability system is the major risk to pork safety in China. An increasing number of recent media reports on pork safety problems at source have attracted great attention and thought to be a growing threat to risk perception amplification on pork safety, even leading to public panic. Understanding how people react to media report is essential to enhance pork quality management, and the design of effective information dissemination policy. This paper was among the first to explore the impact of media report about potential benefits and risk of traceability on consumer utility valuation and preference heterogeneities for select pork traits. By capturing key issues from online media reports in last three years both on benefit (positive group) and risk (negative gourp) of traceability as information shock showed to interviewees, we investigate willingness to pay from 788 consumers across sixteen traceability pilot cities, China. A orthogonal factorial design was employed, which resulted in twelve choice sets based on four two-level traits including information source (farmer or slaughter info.), production (free or captive range), brand (have or not), certificate (have or not), and three-level price. The mixed logit and latent class models are employed to examine preferences heterogeneity by using 28368 choice samples. The findings indicate that consumers value certification more than other pork traits, while only preference on farmerinfo labeling significantly imcreases in negative information group. Highly valued farmerinfo and free range labeling in same class from positive information shock, while consumer preference for free range in one class from negative group. The results suggests existence of preference heterogeneity based on two aspects of media report. Considering heterogeneity within population segments provides a framework for adapting information dissemination to react in food crisis for firm managers, and to improve pork product labeling policy interventions for food supervisors by integrating preferred pork traits in a traceability system.