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The Impact of Health Risk Information on Food Demand: A Case Study of Alar and Apples

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Economics of Food Safety

Abstract

One method used for overcoming the problem of preference revelation for safety improvements is to infer willingness-to-pay from consumer choice of private goods (Blomquist 1979, Dardis 1980, Hammitt 1986, Ippolito and Ippolito 1984). This strategy may be useful for estimating willingness-to-pay for food safety because in recent years information on risks from food additives has been widely reported by the news media and these reports have been found to affect food demand (Brown 1969, Brown and Folsom 1983, Johnson 1988, Shulstad and Stoevener 1978, Smith et al. 1988, Swartz and Strand 1981).

They thank Professor Richard Baillie and research assistant Lih-Chyun Sun for providing valuable econometric assistance and research assistants Bill Guyton and Sedef Birkan for data collection efforts. Thanks are also due to Andy Manale, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Richard Wiles, Board on Agriculture, National Research Council for providing quantitative risk estimates. This research was supported in part by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cooperative agreement (CR-815424-01), Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture cooperative agreement (58-3J23-1-0334X), and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

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© 1991 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc.

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van Ravenswaay, E.O., Hoehn, J.P. (1991). The Impact of Health Risk Information on Food Demand: A Case Study of Alar and Apples. In: Caswell, J.A. (eds) Economics of Food Safety. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7076-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7076-5_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-011-7078-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-7076-5

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