Evaluating consumers' sustainable choice of wine: A store experiment
Résumé
In order to develop successful environmentally sustainable policies that help consumers to change their consumption patterns, it is necessary to better understand consumers' choice criteria and the potential impact of an information campaign. As hypothetical methods are often criticized and as Smith (1980) and Lewitt and List (2007) have shown that laboratory behavior is a good indicator of actual behavior, an experiment was conducted in an experimental store. This option makes possible to control the range of proposed wines and their prices and thus to study the impact of production process, price on purchase and to evaluate the impact of information on purchase. About two hundred wine consumers aged between 20 and 70 years old from Dijon area (France) participated in the study. Each consumer came twice, at three weeks intervals, in the experimental store to buy one bottle of wine among the proposed offer. Consumers were presented with 11 wine alternatives varying according three price levels and four levels of environmental friendly process (conventional, integrated, organic, biodynamic agriculture). The chosen wine was recorded for each consumer at each session. After the first session, consumers were split into two groups: Non-Informed (G1) and Informed (G2). Informed group received at home information about sustainable production process. At the end of the second session consumers answered to different questions about their choice criteria, wine consumption and purchase behavior, perception of information, and socio-economic characteristics. Moreover, an incentive compatible method and a declarative method were used to characterize risk aversion of the participants in order to understand if this individual characteristic was correlated with their attitude and behavior towards an environmental purchase. Data will be analyzed with a statistical model to explain choices according price and production process, to examine the impact of information as well as the impact of individual characteristics. Results of this on-going experiment will be presented during the symposium. This study is part of VINPEST - "An experimental investigation of the willingness to produce environmentally friendly wine", an Integrated Project financed by the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Energy (MEDDE).