Crise sanitaires de l'alimentation et analyses comportementales

This article deals with the actual expectations of consumers on food safety and their predictable behaviour in case of foodborne outbreaks. We start from the concepts developed in the microeconomic theories of behavior in relation to risk and we present an overview of the purchase process for risky products for both sanitary crises (what we denote the 'immediate risk') and for long-term processes (what we denote 'diffuse risk'). We show the reason why the consumer has a specific behavior with respect to the sanitary risk and that this behavior is difficult to reconcile with the classical theory of expected utility. Behavioral biases such as the denial of risk or non-rational boycott are instead much more frequently observed in reality, which leads us to believe that safety should be regarded more as a due and not as a demand for quality in the economic sense.