an investigation of changes in consumer preferences for red vs. poultry meat in iran (an application of non-parametric test)

in this study, change in the iranian households’ preferences for red vs. poultry meat is investigated over the period of 1974-2006. to this end, a linear programming model is developed as based on sakong and hayes (1992) proposed methodology, while changes in preferences being estimated by in terms of variances in the estimated quantities of per capita consumption of these two commodities during the study period. results indicate that per capita consumption of these commodities has varied for some of the years in the study period that cannot be explained by change in relative prices. however, given that the variances are not steady, one cannot conclude a permanent change in the iranian households’ preference for either of these two food products. based on the obtained to be all results, change in preferences has been positive for poultry meat while (for red meat) being positive (for some years) and negative for (some other years) throughout the whole study period. the accumulated sums of the quantity changes are 3.3 and 5.3 kilograms, respectively, for red vs. poultry meat.