Context dependency and consumer acceptance of risk reducing strategies – a choice experiment study on Salmonella risks in pork

The paper investigates to what extent context dependency is present, when consumers are introduced to different risk reducing technologies and how this will affect their preferences for reductions in food risks. In particular, choice experiments are used to elicit consumer preferences for reducing Salmonella risks in pork using farm level interventions vs. decontamination of meat at the abattoir. We found an interesting asymmetry in the context dependency. The presence of the least preferred risk reduction technology (lactic acid decontamination) affected the relative preferences for the two most preferred technologies (farm level intervention relative to water decontamination). However, the presence of farm level intervention did not affect the relative preferences for the two least preferred technologies (decontamination using lactic acid relative to water). These results are in line with earlier findings of bad news having greater effect than good news – now applied to context dependency of preferences for food safety technologies.