Firms who sell regional or specialty products often share a collective reputation based on aggregate quality. Collective reputation can be approached as a dynamic common property resource problem. We show that for an experience good without firm traceability, individual firms have the incentive...

This study relates the social-demographic characteristics of urban Chinese consumers to their consumption of fluid milk. A Tobit model is estimated drawing on individual consumer survey data collected in urban Qingdao in China in 2005. The major results of this study indicate that fluid milk...

The discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’, in Japan caused anxiety about consuming beef and beef products. As a result, there was a sudden fall in sales of beef that hurt the Japanese beef industry as well as major beef exporters to Japan....

Consumers' attitudes toward quality and desire for cultural identification have generated a growing demand for agricultural products that carry a strong identification with a particular geographical region. Many of these products are currently protected by European Legislation. A hedonic...

Nutrition labels can potentially benefit consumers by increasing product knowledge and reducing search costs. However, the global increase in obesity rates leads one to question the effectiveness of current nutrition information formats. Alternative formats for providing nutrition information...

We introduce a method for estimating multiple class regression models when class membership is uncertain. The procedure-local polynomial regression clustering-first estimates a nonparametric model via local polynomial regression, and then identifies the underlying classes by aggregating sample...

A good can be identified by its region or country of origin, the firm that produces it, and its product name. In other words, names can nest within each other to categorize goods with increasing specificity. This article develops a conceptual framework for jointly analyzing the effect of...