Consumers indicate on surveys that price and freshness are important to their purchase decisions. If this is true, then why don’t retailers sell milk differentiated by the date it was pasteurized or why are meats not displayed with several different prices based on time since butchering? Our...

Direct and indirect attempts to increase parents’ fruit and vegetable purchases have had little, if any, success. Most of the disappointing results are reported in the grocery environment. In this context, embedding messages with social meaning may have a significant impact on current...

Farm-to-hospital (FTH) programs can potentially improve the economy of local communities and preserve the environment. Research on adoption of farm-to-hospital (FTH) programs is extremely limited in the agricultural and applied economics literature. Using data from our 2012 regional FTH program...

Bovine somatotropin (bST), a genetically engineered hormone for dairy cows that could increase milk yields by as much as 10 to 25 percent, is currently in the final phases of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process. Anticipating its ultimate approval economists and industry...

We study consumer preferences for socially-responsible certified coffee based on alternative ways to distribute the price premium of the product. We use Becker, DeGroot, and Marschak (BDM) auctions in an experimental setting to elicit consumer willingness to pay for two socially-responsible...

We investigate consumer response to various types of advertising for fruits and vegetables—a food category which health officials uniformly agree is significantly underconsumed in the United States. Using an adult, non-student subject pool of participants in the experiment, consumers’...

The dominant pattern in U.S. non-alcoholic drink: consumption over the past 25 years has been a steady increase in per capita soft-drink: consumption, largely at the expense of coffee (and to a lesser extent) milk consumption. Our findings suggest that the major factor governing this pattern is...