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This paper reviews the current literature on theoretical and methodological issues in discrete choice experiments, which have been widely used in non-market value analysis, such as elicitation of residents' attitudes toward recreation or biodiversity conservation of forests.

We review the literature, and attribute the possible biases in choice experiments to theoretical and empirical aspects. Particularly, we introduce regret minimization as an alternative to random utility theory and sheds light on incentive compatibility, status quo, attributes non-attendance, cognitive load, experimental design, survey methods, estimation strategies and other issues.

The practitioners should pay attention to many issues when carrying out choice experiments in order to avoid possible biases. Many alternatives in theoretical foundations, experimental designs, estimation strategies and even explanations should be taken into account in practice in order to obtain robust results.

The paper summarizes the recent developments in methodological and empirical issues of choice experiments and points out the pitfalls and future directions both theoretically and empirically.

Environmental Accounting (EA) practices have developed rapidly in some countries and have a positive impact on their organizations. Sustainability report (SR) as an indicator of EA practices helps company gain a better reputation and it is set by management. However, some ASEAN countries including Indonesia do not have relevant accounting standards on the environment. EA practice is still not widely known in Indonesia, although, internationally there have been standards that provide guidelines for aspect of the environment such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Another aspect in GRI is remuneration. Remuneration is part of personnel cost which is a motivation about the positive effects of EA practices to disclose management concern. This research introduces a tool to evaluate a remuneration structure and the consistency of EA practices in the Sustainability Report.

Packaging and labelling have become essential to how food manufacturers generate and deliver value to customers. The information displayed on the packaging can be used to communicate to customers the properties and unique characteristics of a food product (e.g. nutrients, calories and country of origin). To achieve communication goals effectively, manufacturers need to understand how consumers evaluate products based on their attributes. In particular, companies should be aware of which specific product attributes affect consumer buying behaviour and which product attributes are more critical during food assessment. So, the paper aims to investigate consumer's behaviuor linked to typical product attributes indicated on the packaging.

The present study examines consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for a cherry jam with different attributes (brand, type of production method and price) on a sample of 2,166 Italian respondents through a choice experiment using a random parameter logit-error component model.

The results showed that WTP for jams can be affected by attributes such as brand, price and production methods; precisely, they indicated that the level of naturalness in the production process constitutes the main element for the consumer’s choice; however, the considerable weight that price and brand have in influencing the purchasing behaviour of the food consumer was still confirmed: in fact, a p-value of less than 0.05 was found in all cases.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that assesses the effect of different types of production on WTP for food products. In addition, this study also reflects on the importance of the level of education for consumer choice.

Using a generic cheese as an anchor product, in this study consumers' preferences for different EU quality schemes have been investigated. Specifically, the study aims to understand whether “Protected Designation of Origin” (PDO), “Organic” and “Mountain Product” labels are independent or if there are some synergies existing between them, questioning – at the same time – whether this alleged exchange of value plays a positive or negative role in terms of consumers' willingness to pay.

A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted on 600 Italian consumers performing a random parameter logit model. The respondents were representative of the Italian population in terms of age, gender and geographical distribution. Consumers' preferences for the presence of “Organic” and “Mountain product” labels were assessed in the DCE, together with the effect of price, for both PDO and generic cheeses.

Consumers are willing to pay a premium in price for “Organic” and “Mountain Product” per se, for cheese with and without the PDO denomination. Considering the interaction effects, results showed that the combined use of “Organic” and “Mountain Product” labels do not decrease consumers' intention to buy. However, when applied on a PDO product, these attributes generate a lower consumers' willingness to pay in comparison with the generic ones, highlighting a possible overlapping between them.

Despite the abundant literature on EU quality schemes in many food categories, this study represents one of the first attempts to measure the interaction effect between different EU quality schemes.

This paper aims to explore the design of management teams when the critical task facing individual managers is monitoring the performance of worker teams and producing performance measures under uncertain information environments.

The authors use a multi-agent LEN framework – linear contract, exponential utility and normal density – to model the incentive provision and organizational design.

The main lesson is that the use of performance measures under uncertainty is greatly affected by the potential for free-riding in the very monitoring activities which generate the measures to begin with. Accordingly, the value of having a management team, that is the incremental benefit of having a second manager, depends on the monitoring technology. Of particular importance are the potential free-riding in monitoring effort among multiple managers and synergies gained from having more than one manager, such as correlation among the performance measures produced or improvement due to splitting workers pool into separate groups for each manager to monitor separately.

The paper pushes this line of research further by explicitly modeling the endogenous process of signal generation within a rich economic environment. In this environment, number of workers being evaluated and number of managers who produce the signals are both endogenous. Furthermore, both workers and managers are subject to moral hazard problem. In particular, the managers suffer from potential free-riding problems but may benefit from synergistic forces due to team monitoring.

The present study aims at analysing consumer preferences for the pomegranate fruit, focussing on the effect of ready-to-eat format (i.e. packaged arils) on the purchasing choice, together with several products’ attributes as the origin, the packaging typology and the price.

The paper presents a choice experiment (CE) among 626 Italian consumers from Veneto region through an online survey. The study estimates both a conditional logit (CL) and a latent class logit model (LCM).

By segmenting the sample based on the heterogeneous preferences of consumers, it can distinguish “eco-friendly consumers”, “time-saving lovers”, “nationalists” and “price sensitive” subjects. Interestingly, the marginal willingness to pay for ready-to-eat arils is positive for the “time-saving lovers” that are mainly young consumers. The Italian origin has always a positive effect on the choice, whereas a negative effect is found for the price. Finally, the eco-friendly package has both a negative and a positive effect.

The sample of this study is not representative of the population and the CE has a hypothetical nature. It follows that further research will link the economic analysis to a consumer test on a more representative sample.

This study can be useful for the pomegranate producers and the industry because it provides original evidence that could drive their business and marketing strategies, for instance, the preference for ready-to-eat arils.

This study is one of the first seeking to determine the factors that affect consumers' preferences for pomegranate arils.

Micronutrient malnutrition is a public health problem in many developing countries, especially in the poorest population segments. Fortification and other food-based approaches, such as using more nutritious ingredients in processing, could help to address this problem, but little is known about poor consumers’ attitudes toward nutritionally enhanced foods. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether poor consumers in Africa would purchase foods with more nutritious ingredients and the related willingness and ability to pay.

A survey and choice experiment were conducted with 600 randomly selected households in the poorest neighborhoods of Nairobi (Kenya) and Kampala (Uganda). Participants were asked to choose between various alternatives of porridge flour with different types of nutritional attributes. The data were analyzed with mixed logit models. Porridge flour is widely consumed among the urban poor, so that the example can also provide interesting broader lessons.

Poor consumers welcome foods that are micronutrient-fortified or include new types of nutritious ingredients. However, willingness to pay for nutritional attributes is small. New ingredients that are perceived to have little effect on taste and appearance are seen more positively than ingredients that may change food products more notably.

New nutritionally enhanced foods have good potential in markets for the poor, if they build on local consumption habits and are not associated with significant price increases.

This is among the first studies to explicitly analyze poor consumers’ preferences for nutritionally enhanced foods.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how and why disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) information was influenced by independent directors in Japan and the USA.

The author used a pooled cross-sectional data set of 498 Fortune Japanese and American firms between 2006 and 2011 and fixed effects estimation method. The author analysed the results by employing a comparative approach between the two national contexts.

This study found that independent directors in Japanese firms had a significant positive effect on CSR disclosure whilst no evidence was found in the US firms, although the proportion of independent directors on American boards traditionally and largely outnumbers that of the Japanese counterparts.

The study results offer an insight that independent directors could be evaluated in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in CSR disclosure. The findings support the stakeholder theory in Japanese globalised companies while challenging the theory in the US context, thereby calling for further research into the stakeholder engagement models, particularly in the USA.

This study provides empirical evidence of the economic valuation of ecosystem services. It examines the willingness-to-pay (WTP) and compensating surplus (CS) in response to policy change based on focus group discussion (FGD) and survey.

A randomized conjoint analysis based experiment was conducted in seven villages of Sundarbans in Bangladesh to elicit stated preference data and measure WTP and CS. Each respondent faced three options in every choice card-two hypothetical alternatives and one status quo scheme. Four alternatives – payment for ecosystem services, storm protection, erosion control and habitat for fish breeding – are randomly and simultaneously assigned to the two alternatives.

The findings suggest that age, income, education, family size and occupational status are the influential factor to choice the relevant attributes of ecosystem services and their levels. Villagers would like to pay annually Tk. 703, Tk. 281, and Tk. 59 for lower, moderate, and higher ecosystem services. With these WTP, they get surplus Tk. 760, Tk. 138, and Tk. 346 respectively.

The lower WTP does not necessarily imply low demand for ecosystem service, as the findings from WTP illustrate potential demand for ecosystem services of Sundarbans.

The study provides an important insight into the ecosystem services and values of Sundarbans mangrove forests for welfare and can inform policy for sustainable use of resources of this forest.

There is a crucial gap in understanding what could villagers be ready for WTP for better ecosystem services of Sundarbans mangrove forest, how do payment based ecosystem services, as a proxy for the conservation of Sundarbans mangrove, and to what extent the policy can be strengthened.

There is widespread concern about the fact that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seem to be particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. This is perhaps because smaller businesses lack sufficient situational awareness to make informed decisions in this space, or because they lack the resources to implement security controls and precautions.

In this paper, Endsley’s theory of situation awareness was extended to propose a model of SMEs’ cyber situational awareness, and the extent to which this awareness triggers the implementation of cyber security measures. Empirical data were collected through an online survey of 361 UK-based SMEs; subsequently, the authors used partial least squares modeling to validate the model.

The results show that heightened situational awareness, as well as resource availability, significantly affects SMEs’ implementation of cyber precautions and controls.

While resource limitations are undoubtedly a problem for SMEs, their lack of cyber situational awareness seems to be the area requiring most attention.

The findings of this study are reported and recommendations were made that can help to improve situational awareness, which will have the effect of encouraging the implementation of cyber security measures.

This is the first study to apply the situational awareness theory to understand why SMEs do not implement cyber security best practice measures.