How country of origin influences Chinese consumers' evaluation of imported milk? Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • PurposeThe purpose of this study is to decompose the effects of country-of-origin labeling (COOL) into multiple dimensionsmacrolevel image, related to the country image, and microlevel image, related to dairy industry/product attributesand investigate how each dimension affects Chinese consumers' evaluation of imported milk.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted the BeckerDeGrootMarschak (BDM) auction mechanism to elicit consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for milk from different countries (New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France and China). The experiment was conducted with 348 shoppers at supermarkets in three major cities of China (Hangzhou, Wuhan and Shijiazhuang). The study subject was ultrahigh-temperature processing (UHT) milk (200mL Tetra Pak aseptic brick package).FindingsThe results show that Chinese consumers are willing to pay a premium for UHT milk from New Zealand, Australia, Germany and France compared to domestic milk, and the premiums are 59.4, 58.9, 57.9, and 52.9% respectively. Both microlevel and macrolevel images exert a substantial influence on consumers' WTP, and the microlevel image has a greater impact on consumers' evaluation of milk than the macrolevel image. Particularly, the macropolitical, microtechnology/quality and microdesign/package dimensions have a positive influence on WTP for milk.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the existing literature in introducing the country-of-origin image (COI) construct with different dimensions to get in-depth knowledge about the country-of-origin (COO) effect in food or agricultural economics.

published proceedings

  • CHINA AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIC REVIEW

author list (cited authors)

  • Zhang, Y., Jin, S., Zhang, Y. Y., & Yu, X.

citation count

  • 10

complete list of authors

  • Zhang, Yan||Jin, Shaosheng||Zhang, Yu Yvette||Yu, Xiaohua

publication date

  • January 2021