The Role of Trust in Explaining Food Choice: Combining Choice Experiments and Attribute Best Worst Scaling

This paper presents empirical findings from a combination of two elicitation techniques: discrete choice experiment (DCE) and best-worst scaling (BWS) to provide information about the role of consumers’ trust in food choice decisions in the case of credence attributes. The analysis is carried out at the example of Taiwan and focuses on sweet red peppers. DCE data is examined using latent class analysis to investigate the importance and the utility different consumer segments attach to process attributes and their respective levels: production method, country of origin and chemical residual testing. The relevance of attitudinal and trust based items is analyzed by BWS using hierarchical Bayesian mixed logit model. Applying multinomial logit model participant’s latent class membership (obtained from DCE data) is regressed on the identified attitudinal and trust components considering, in addition, demographic information. The analysis is based on a sample of 459 Taiwanese consumers. Results of the DCE latent class analysis for the product attributes show that four distinct segments can be distinguished. Linking the DCE with the attitudinal dimensions reveals that consumers’ attitude and trust significantly explains class membership. Hence, consumers’ food purchase behavior is determined by consumers’ trust in products from respective counties products, labels, and institutions.