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The primary purpose is to examine the factors that affect the use of nutritional facts, nutrient content claims and health claims on food label use in the United Kingdom.

The paper reports the results of a survey of over 300 face‐to‐face interviews with shoppers of Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury – three of the major supermarkets in the UK.

Product class involvement factors, individual characteristics, health‐related factors (nutritional knowledge, health locus of control, perceived need of dietary change), situational, attitudinal and behavioral factors were found to be significant factors affecting the use of nutritional information and nutritional and health claims on food labeling. While the use of nutritional information and health claims increases with the stated importance of “nutrition” and “family preferences”, it is less likely among shoppers for whom “taste” is an important driver of food purchasing behaviour. There is also evidence of mistrust in health claims, as indicated by the negative relationship between the consideration of such claims and the stated importance of “quality” and perceived need to “change dietary quality” – the more discerning shoppers are the least likely to consider health claims.

The study provides evidence that a wider range of product class involvement factors is necessary to predict the use of nutritional information and nutritional and health claims on food labeling. It also offers a conceptualization of health‐related factors to include health locus of control as a predictor of the acquisition of nutrition and health information.

Using New Jersey as a case study, this article investigates the challenges faced by food retail stores. Policy recommendations proposed by industry representatives for improving the business climate are also presented. Although New Jersey‐specific, many of the issues discussed in the paper may be relevant elsewhere. Consequently, the findings can be helpful in identifying broad categories of factors affecting the vitality of the industry and in designing investigative research into problems facing the food retail industry.

This paper sets out to investigate the factors affecting product class involvement for food. Factors affecting specific aspects of involvement are also to be explored. The aim is to determine the factors that affect involvement with food and sketch the profile of consumers more likely to be involved or not involved with food. This paper also seeks to assess the factors affecting the importance attached to different aspects of food such as taste, price, nutrition, ease of preparation, and brand name.

Building on the literature a conceptual model is developed and empirically tested using survey data collected from supermarkets in Athens. Data were analyzed using probit and ordered probit analysis and marginal effects were calculated which show how much the level of involvement or importance is affected when a variable is changed.

This study finds that younger consumers, those with higher education and income who engage in nutritional label use behavior and do not prepare food for their household are more likely to have low involvement with food. Less distinctive characteristics are apparent for the highly involved consumers. Different consumer profiles are also associated with different aspects of food involvement based on importance attached to price, ease of preparation, nutrition, taste, and brand name.

A caveat has to do with the localized nature of this study and therefore the limitations in generalizing results. Future research could use larger samples and other measures of product class involvement to test the robustness of these results.

The study suggests that overall involvement with food, based on attribute importance, is affected by several socioeconomic and attitudinal variables. The findings also suggest that different profiles of consumers can be associated with different aspects or attributes of food such as taste, price, nutrition, ease of preparation, and brand name. The analysis can be used as a segmentation tool that can assist marketing management with marketing mix decisions, and in particular with promotional strategy in order to increase marketing efficiency.

The paper gives new insights on consumer segmentation. It provides the profile of consumers more likely to be involved or not involved with food based on specific aspects such as price, nutrition, taste, ease of preparation and brand name.

This article examines the business relationships in the cold chain used for exporting food to new markets in developing countries. The American Potato Trade Alliance, a cross‐network alliance that includes all levels of the value chain, is the subject of case study research involving participant observation and fieldwork in the Philippines and Thailand. Multinational restaurant companies manage technical challenges in target markets with tight specifications and exclusive supply chains, while smaller firms use extensive networks to supply imported frozen potatoes. Pricing strategies for cold chain services are closely related to quality and potentially affect the availability of outsourced cold chain services. Opportunistic behavior by buyers could reduce incentives for private investment in cold chain infrastructure, while long‐term commitment by chain partners would strengthen the potential for private markets to provide cold chain services in newly developing markets.

The purpose of this paper is to assess Korean consumers' valuation for domestic rice and imported rice from China and the USA.

In order to identify Korean consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for domestic, Chinese, and US rice, the non-hypothetical experimental auction approach (i.e. the random nth price auction) was utilized. Auction participants were randomly assigned to three treatments: no labelling information, country of origin labelling information, and food miles labelling information to analyze the effects of differing labelling information on consumers' valuation.

The results suggest that Korean consumers have a positive perception of and preference for domestic rice, particularly when country of origin information is provided. However, food miles information alone may not help consumers to distinguish between domestic and Chinese rice.

The marketing of imported rice will increase since Korea will be opening its rice market under tariffication after 2015. Therefore, it is necessary for Korea and other exporting countries to identify the feasibility of marketing both domestic and imported rice, and also to investigate which rice from specific countries Korean consumers prefer. Therefore, the authors conducted the random nth price auction using real rice products and cash in transactions.

The objective of this research is to examine, validate, and recommend techniques for handling the problem of missingness in observational data. We use a rich observational data set, the Nielsen HomeScan data set, which allows us to effectively combine elements from simulated data sets: large numbers of observations, large number of data sets and variables, allowing elements of “design” that typically come with simulated data, and its observational nature. We created random 20% and 50% uniform missingness in our data sets and employed several widely used methods of single imputation, such as mean, regression, and stochastic regression imputations, and multiple imputation methods to fill in the data gaps. We compared these methods by measuring the error of predicting the missing values and the parameter estimates from the subsequent regression analysis using the imputed values. We also compared coverage or the percentages of intervals that covered the true parameter in both cases. Based on our results, the method of single regression or conditional mean imputation provided the best predictions of the missing price values with 28.34 and 28.59 mean absolute percent errors in 20% and 50% missingness settings, respectively. The imputation from conditional distribution method had the best rate of coverage. The parameter estimates based on data sets imputed by conditional mean method were consistently unbiased and had the smallest standard deviations. The multiple imputation methods had the best coverage of both the parameter estimates and predictions of the dependent variable.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the market potential of a locally produced and high quality food product (i.e. white bean “Mongeta Ganxet” (MG)) from Catalonia, Spain. Consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for the product is elicited using a non‐hypothetical economic experiment and then the sensitivity of WTP values is analyzed with regard to additional information provided to participants that includes reference prices, leaflets and tasting. Finally, a sample‐selection model is estimated to assess the factors that significantly affect consumers' WTP for the product.

To elicit the willingness to pay a premium for the local food product, 90 subjects were invited to participate in a random nth price experimental auction. Before auctioning the product, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about consumer attitudes and purchase habits.

Only 7 percent of participants are willing to pay a price higher than the minimum price from which the MG product may be purchased directly from a producer or the local producing market. Also, it was found that providing reference prices of substitute products (both conventional and alternative high quality white beans) positively affects WTP for the MG. Interestingly, however, provision of information on organoleptic, nutritional and cooking characteristics of the MG and product tasting do not significantly influence WTP. Finally, the level of consumption, the degree of knowledge about the product and the participants' previous experience increase the purchasing intention for the MG.

In contrast to traditional market research studies that use hypothetical methods, the authors use non‐hypothetical elicitation mechanism to elicit consumers' valuation for an important local food product in Catalonia, Spain. Since actual products and cash were used in the experiments, the authors provided the respondents with an incentive to reveal their true preferences and valuation for the product of interest. The authors also tested the effect of provision of certain types of information on WTP and analyzed the factors that significantly influence consumers' WTP for the product.

This study was conducted with the aim of determining the food purchasing behaviour of consumers from supermarkets.

A total of 430 consumers, 194 males and 236 females, with an average age of 29.96 ±10.99 were included in this study, and was conducted to find out the criteria which consumers took into account while purchasing food.

A significant relationship was determined between the scores the consumers received from nutrition, the reliability and all of the shopping criteria, and their level of education (p < 0.05) between the percentage of income spared for nutrition (p < 0.01) and between the cost (p < 0.05) and the total scores received from all of the shopping criteria (p < 0.01). It was also determined that women paid more attention to the nutrition and reliability criteria than men did (p < 0.05).

The research is restricted in so far as it only considers consumers in the big city and as it is an exploratory study the research is limited in so far as the number of participants is only 430. Further research needs to include other big and small cities.

The study has concluded that consumers need effective and versatile education in the subjects of label reading and buying the right kind of food for their budgets. It is revealed that consumer education is essential in the process from cradle to grave in creating the awareness of consumers to buy food.

The paper is useful to both practitioners and academics in the fields of relationship consumer and marketing. Informing and training consumers will help increase the awareness of consumers and make them behave more rationally in their shopping. It will lead the studies to be carried out in the future to activate the control of the consumers on their shopping, instead of losing the control of consumers.

“The Elephant in the Corner: A Cautionary Tale About Measurement Error in Treatment Effects Models” by Daniel L. Millimet discusses the current use of the unobserved-outcome framework to estimate population-averaged treatment effects, and it exposes the sensitivity of these estimators to assumption of no measurement error. The Monte Carlo simulation evidence in this chapter indicates that “nonclassical measurement error in the covariates, mean-reverting measurement error in the outcome, and simultaneous measurement errors in the outcome, treatment assignment, and covariates have a dramatic, adverse effect on the performance of the various estimators even with relatively small and infrequent errors” (Millimet article, p. 1–39). To some extent, all the estimators analyzed by Millimet are based on weak functional form assumptions and use semiparametric or nonparametric methods. Millimet's results indicate the need for measurement error models be they parametric or nonparametric models, see Schennach (2007), Hu and Schennach (2008), and Matzkin (2007) for some recent research in nonparametric approaches. Chapter 7 develops a Bayesian estimator that can handle some of the measurement errors discussed in this chapter.