Abstract
We can often find organic foods or foods with no chemical fertilizers in the supermarket. Japanese people pay attention to food safety, and want to get information about its quality. The purpose of the paper is to reveal Japanese consumers ’ preferences for agricultural spinach as fresh foods and preference heterogeneity among them. When they purchase it, what attribute they emphasize? Are they sensitive to price or quality of it? We assumed that their preferences are divided into few groups. Thus, we try to confirm this by using choice experiments (CE). The results revealed that there are economic benefits of organic products and local consumption of locally produced foods. On the other hand, the results indicated that there is a significant heterogeneity among Japanese consumers preferences for agricultural spinach as fresh foods.
Keywords: Fresh agricultural food, preference heterogeneity, choice experiments, food safety, Japanese Consumers, region of production, Japanese Agricultural Standards, local NPO certification, Estimation Model, effect of heterogeneity, Latent Class Logit Model, Bayes Information Criterion, Akaike Information Criterion, LIMDEP, organic lovers, to organic certification, WTP (yen), shriveled, fresh, foreign, market structure and trade, log likelihood function (LL), BIC
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