Consumer’'s WTP for Environment-Friendly Production Methods and Collective Reputation for Place of Origin: The Case of Val di Gresta’'s Carrots

This paper investigates preferences for various environment-friendly production system for carrots using discretechoice multi-attribute stated-preference data amongst buyers and explore the effect of collective reputations from growers of an Alpine valley known to be completely dedicated to organic production. Results show that buyers distinctly recognize only organic production as a production system different from the conventional one, and there is some evidence of recognition of collective reputation. As well as for marginal utility of income, substantial unobserved heterogeneity is found for many skin imperfections, origin from the organic Alpine valley and the organic production methods. The implied sample distributions of WTP for each of these random attributes are then compared.