Valuing Sustainability in China's Pork Market: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment

This paper studies how information and framing shape consumers’ preferences of sustainability attributes in China’s pork market, and whether information-induced preference shifts persist over time. We implement a discrete choice experiment with pork consumers in Beijing and Shanghai (N = 887), varying price and three attributes, carbon footprint, water pollution, and animal welfare. The experiment embeds three randomized interventions designed to map onto distinct behavioral channels: child-related framing, health warning-style tips displayed within choice sets, and a two-stage design that introduces a time gap between information exposure and the choice tasks. Mixed logit estimates show targeted preference shifts consistent with these channels. Child-related framing reduces price sensitivity and strengthens aversion to high water pollution. Health tips increase aversion to low animal welfare, with effects concentrated among respondents with weaker baseline healthy-eating habits. By contrast, carbon-footprint valuations decay as the information-to-choice gap lengthens, suggesting limited durability for more abstract attributes. WTP estimates imply economically meaningful premia for sustainability improvements, particularly for reducing water pollution. Overall, the results provide experimentally identified evidence on when information interventions shift multi-attribute sustainability valuations, for whom, and how durable those shifts are, with implications for the timing and design of sustainability labeling and nudging policies.