IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ris/integr/0823.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Regional Origin Outperforms All Other Sustainability Characteristics in Consumer Price Premiums for Honey: Empirical Evidence for Germany

Author

Listed:
  • Bissinger, Katharina

    (Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany)

  • Herrmann, Roland

    (Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany)

Abstract

Sustainability and online retailing are two of the main challenges in the food industry. This study analyzes how honey characteristics, including sustainability indicators, affect consumer prices for honey, using 241 German honey prices in online and offline retailing. Many honey characteristics significantly influence honey prices. However, a clear identification of the regional origin of honey has a particularly strong impact on the consumer price premium. It outperforms all other sustainability indicators such as fairtrade certification, organic production, and environmentally friendly packaging. Regional origins that receive high relative and absolute consumer price premiums are Germany and German regions as well as individual EU and non-EU countries that have a reputation for high-quality in the honey market. Given this evidence, the major demand-side argument behind high consumer price premiums for defined origins appears to be food-safety related concerns. Thus, foreign suppliers will gain from international honey trade with Germany in different ways, depending on their reputation for quality. The magnitude of price premiums is surprisingly stable across different years, as are online prices of honeys that belong to the “core” assortment. Changes in the depth of the assortment, such as non-price competition, rather than price adjustments clear the market.

Suggested Citation

  • Bissinger, Katharina & Herrmann, Roland, 2021. "Regional Origin Outperforms All Other Sustainability Characteristics in Consumer Price Premiums for Honey: Empirical Evidence for Germany," Journal of Economic Integration, Center for Economic Integration, Sejong University, vol. 36(1), pages 162-184.
  • Handle: RePEc:ris:integr:0823
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.e-jei.org
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Smoluk-Sikorska, Joanna, 2023. "Price Relations of Organic and Conventional Fruit and Vegetables," Roczniki (Annals), Polish Association of Agricultural Economists and Agribusiness - Stowarzyszenie Ekonomistow Rolnictwa e Agrobiznesu (SERiA), vol. 2023(4).
    2. Petjon Ballco & Fatma Jaafer & Tiziana de Magistris, 2022. "Investigating the price effects of honey quality attributes in a European country: Evidence from a hedonic price approach," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(4), pages 885-904, October.
    3. Joanna Smoluk-Sikorska & Magdalena Śmiglak-Krajewska & Stanislav Rojík & Pavlína Rojík Fulnečková, 2023. "Prices of Organic Food—The Gap between Willingness to Pay and Price Premiums in the Organic Food Market in Poland," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 14(1), pages 1-19, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fairtrade; Hedonic Price Analysis; Origin; Organic Production;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
    • L66 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Food; Beverages; Cosmetics; Tobacco
    • Q13 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Markets and Marketing; Cooperatives; Agribusiness

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:integr:0823. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Yunhoe Kim (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desejkr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.