How country-of-origin influence Chinese consumers evaluation for imported milk?

The importation of liquid milk has been increasing rapidly with an average annual growth rate over 40% after 2008. The objective of this study is to investigate how country-of-origin (COO) affects Chinese consumers' evaluation for imported milk sourced from Australia, New Zealand, German and France. We decompose the effects of COO into dimensions at macro-level related to country images and four dimensions at micro-level related to product attributes. We then investigate how different dimensions influence consumers' evaluation of milk using the Becker-Degroot-Marschak (BDM) auctions. The results show that Chinese consumers would like to pay a premium for UHT milk from foreign countries. The regression results confirm that COO exerts substantial influence on consumers' evaluation for food products. In general, the micro-level image has greater impact on evaluation for milk than macro-level image. Particularly, the macro-political dimension has positive influence on consumers' WTP for milk, while the macro-economic and macro-technological dimension have no significant impact. In terms of the micro-level image, except for the micro-price/value dimension, all the other dimensions exert positively impact on evaluation for milk, i.e. the more favorable of the perceived COO, the higher is the WTP. Specifically, micro-technology/quality dimension exerts greater influence than micro-prestige/brand dimension, and micro-design/package dimension has the least impact. Acknowledgement : The authors would like to thank research assistant Haiyue Guo, Yue Jin, Changhua Qian?Rao Yuan, Zhanyi Shi, Yu Jiang for their helpful support. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC-71273233, 71333011), the Major Program of the Key Research Institute of Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 15JJD790032), the Key Consulting Project of Chinese Academy of Engineering Research on the Development Strategy of China s Prataculture (2016-XZ-38), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzuzbky-2017-k01).