The Region-of-Origin Effect of Apple and Apple Juice on Consumer Purchase Intention

Abstract

The objective of this study is to elicit the region-of-origin effect on apple and its juice. The questionnaire was structured based on choice experiment (CE). Respondents were asked to choose among four alternatives, each described by varying the prices, the cultivation methods, the production areas, and the store types. Respondents were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups with/without offering social benefits from using locally grown food. The conditional logit and latent class model were applied to estimate the consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the attributes with considering preference heterogeneity. The results are as follows: The WTP for locally produced apple is higher than that for domestic one only in the treatment group. It means that providing the information on the social benefit of local foods can increase the purchase intention. Consumers can be divided into two groups: the first considers the cultivation environment such as the cultivation methods, the production areas more important than the price, and the second one does the price than others when purchasing agricultural products.