Risk Communication Strategies and Consumer Behaviours within Food Related Contexts

Abstract

This thesis addresses various food safety and food consumption challenges and investigates them from an economic perspective within three different, but related studies. Each study provides public authorities with valuable information that will assist them with the development and implementation of meaningful and targeted food policy interventions designed to positively influence consumer food related behaviours and choices. These studies further contribute to the literature by investigating and presenting several applications of advancements in choice modelling. To address these challenges, two web-based surveys were administrated to respondents in Scotland and the United Kingdom. The first study that is presented investigates the role of individual responsibility prompts in consumer choices of a food safety campaign, and how these prompts change their stated choices of food safety campaigns that are most likely to influence the way they handle, cook, and store their food. The means by which this investigation is achieved are novel, as a discrete choice experiment is used to assess consumer choices of different types of food safety campaigns. In this context, choice experiments are particularly useful because they allow consumers to evaluate food safety campaigns with multiple characteristics. This is different to previous studies that have used Likert-type rating scales to investigate specific communication channels (e.g., television, newspapers, fact sheets). The findings generated by this analysis reveal that emphasizing consumers’ individual responsibility can be a factor that affects the effectiveness of a policy intervention, and that differently framed responsibility prompts can be used to maximise the impact of such policies. The second study builds on our understanding of the self-persuasive power of questions and uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate if and how differently framed knowledge-based information can affect consumer processing strategies, and, consequently, their consideration sets of alternatives. Additionally, this study also introduces and explores the use of a novel approach – that of adjunct questions (i.e., questions that aim to draw attention to important aspects of a text) – in stated choice experiment surveys. This particular investigation conjectures that adjunct questions affect individuals’ attention, and accordingly, their intake of information, which, in turn, may impact how they process the consideration set of alternatives in a choice task. This study’s findings confirm that individuals’ consideration sets are affected, that they vary by differently framed knowledge-based information, and that consumers consider and choose less frequently a "No campaign" option in the adjunct question treatment. The third study aims to understand a current societal and policy issue: how consumers make trade-offs between meat and plant-based ingredients. It further extends our understanding of choices and decision-making in two ways: (1) when the impact of meat consumption to consumer health is communicated, and (2) when the environmental impact of meat consumption is communicated. In addition to the contextual contribution, this third study also contributes to the literature by exploring the use of Bayesian Truth Serum and Inferred Valuation as hypothetical bias mitigation techniques. Overall, we report differences in choices based on the contextual experimental set-up and the hypothetical bias technique used. The findings in this third study demonstrate the differences and similarities across these experimental setups and assist policymakers to design targeted policy interventions.