Weak Aversion to GM Foods: Experimental Evidence from India

The paper makes two important contributions to the literature studying consumer attitudes towards genetically modified foods. First, it elicits willingness- to- pay for similar food products that differ only in their content of GMOs. Second and more importantly, it examines how probabilistic information matters in the formation of food preferences. The paper advances a definition of consumers who are weakly GM averse, i.e., those who do not react to probabilistic information unless it comes in the form of a label. An experiment involving auctions of food products is designed to estimate weak GM aversion on the part of such consumers. In our experiment, about one-fifth of GM averse subjects are weakly averse. Presence of such consumers may have implications for the potential market size for labeled GM foods.