Experimental Evidence on Willingness to Pay for Red Meat Traceability in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan

Abstract

We employed Vickrey auctions to generate willingness-to-pay (WTP) data for red meat traceability and related product characteristics with comparable experimental auctions in the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Japan. The results show that subjects are willing to pay a nontrivial premium for traceability, but the same subjects show even higher WTP for traceability-provided characteristics like additional meat safety and humane animal treatment guarantees. The implication is that producers might be able to implement traceable meat systems profitably by tailoring the verifiable characteristics of the product to consumer preferences.