Some neglected issues in food demand analysis: retail-level demand, health information and product quality

Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Demand Analysis

Managing Quality under Heterogeneous Consumer Demand and Product Quality

Based on accepted advances in the marketing, economics, consumer behavior, and satisfaction literatures, we develop a micro-foundations model of a firm that needs to manage the quality of a product that is inherently heterogeneous in the presence of varying customer tastes or expectations for quality. Our model blends elements of the returns to quality, customer lifetime value, and service prof...

Retail Pricing with Asymmetric Demand

Recent empirical work suggests that demand functions may, in some cases, be ÒasymmetricÓ. For example, evidence suggests that high quality items ÔstealÕ sales from low quality items, but the converse is not true. It is important to consider the possible impact of such empirical findings of consumer behavior on managerial decision making. In particular, there can be important implications for re...

Fragility in Dairy Product Demand Analysis

Several reasons justify the expectation of increasingly price elastic demand for dairy products. Using weekly scanner data, we find support for this hypotheses, but with wide variation in elasticity estimates across model specifications. The results demonstrate the need for more routine specification testing before basing recommendations on potentially fragile inferences. keywords: dairy produc...

Consumer Issues and Demand

Consumers worldwide are driving changes in animal agriculture. Rising consumer income, changing demographics and lifestyles, and shifting preferences due to new information about the links between diet and health all contribute to new demands for foods. At the same time, technological changes in production, processing and distribution, structural change and growth in large-scale retailing, and ...