The effect of sustainability labels on farmed-shrimp preferences: Insights from a discrete choice experiment in Vietnam

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of sustainability labels, environmental attitudes, food safety concerns, and knowledge on Vietnamese consumer preferences for sustainably farmed shrimp. Mixed logit and latent class models were applied to estimate utility functions based on 459 samples collected using a choice experiment. The results indicate that Vietnamese consumers prefer sustainably farmed shrimp to conventionally farmed shrimp. Also, both food safety concerns and consumer knowledge vigorously promote sustainably farmed shrimp choices. Notably, the latent class results show that 73.5% of the respondents consider their environmental concerns about shrimp production when making decisions about consumption. The results indicate that placing information related to eco-friendly and food safety attributes on sustainability labels provides Vietnamese consumers with additional choices in the form of sustainably farmed shrimp. Finally, the simulated MXL results in the WTP space are more significant than those in the preference space, indicating that it is necessary to estimate the MXL in the WTP space to avoid specifying the parameter distribution subjectively by analysts.