Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Visual attention, measured by eye tracking, increasingly attracts behavioral and experimental economists in investigating consumer preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for product attributes. When modeling consumer preference for product attributes in choice experiments and experimental auctions, the conventional economic approach assumes that consumers visually process all the presented product attributes and trade off among different product alternatives. However, recent evidence from consumer neuroscience literature has suggested that consumers apply heuristic decision rules in processing product information. For instance, consumers might not pay attention to all product attributes (i.e., attribute non-attendance), are more likely to select the choice that their first or last attention/gaze was directed to (i.e., gaze cascade effect), or might evaluate products primarily on a specific attribute that is important to them (i.e., lexicographic choice). These findings implicitly acknowledge that visual attention is a crucial measure that should be taken into account in consumer preference/choice experiments. While attribute non-attendance attracted considerable research interest, other visual attention patterns such as the gaze cascade effect and lexicographic choices have received relative little attention. In this study, we aim to empirically test the lexicographic choice and gaze cascade effects, while examining consumer preference for labels disclosing the presence and absence of specific types of insecticides (neonicotinoids). We further explore how visual attention pattern may help explain consumer WTP for different neonicotinoid labeling formats and information framing.