Will online market help improve food safety from small suppliers? _evidence from China

With the booming of e-commerce, consumers are turning to online markets for food. Among all countries, China has the largest food online buyers with 0.541 billion consumers shopping for food online. Thanks to the free services provided by multiple e-commerce and social platforms and to the developed delivery networks, farmers can sell their products online at low transition cost in China. Meanwhile, the capacities of online stores to highlight traceablity and production process and of platforms to reveal quality signals through consumer s reviewing and scoring systems, can decrease asymmetric information about food product quality and safety compared with offline markets. Thus, those special features of online market may in return to encourage farmers to change their marketing plans to sell more safe food online. Our paper uses choice experiment method to solicit farmers different production and marketing preferences, and finds that farmers perceive higher rewards selling safer products than conventional products when using e-commerce platforms, an evidence supporting the positive impact of online market channel on the supply of safer food. Acknowledgement : Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank China Rural Household Panel Survey (CRHPS) for their helpful support. We also gratefully acknowledge the support from China Academy for Rural Development, Zhejiang University.