Conveying Customized Nutritional Information: Willingness-To-Pay and Consumer Segments

Nutritional labels on the food we purchase are designed to combat an increase in food related diseases. However, despite being shown to offer consumers some benefits, their influence is moderated by factors such as consumer heterogeneity. Recent advances in technology might assist retailers and policy makers by providing consumers with the option to examine more customized and targeted information of greater relevance to their needs, and to assist them making better decisions. Using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) this paper develops a model to predict consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for different attributes of customization and accounts for consumer heterogeneity by identifying key consumer segments.