A Battle of Taste and Environmental Convictions for Ecolabeled Seafood: A Contingent Ranking Experiment

Consumers face pressure from environmental groups to modify their seafood purchase decisions based on concerns about fisheries' production practices. Existing research provides little information indicating whether seafood consumers are willing to change purchasing behavior based on a product's environmental attributes, to the exclusion of other attributes. We describe a contingent ranking experiment addressing preferences for fresh seafood, allowing for choices among different species, some displaying an ecolabel. Results suggest consumers consider overfishing sufficiently important to contemplate changing the species of fish they buy; however, they are unwilling to choose a less-favored species based solely on the presence of an ecolabel.