AUTHOR=Boonkong Achara , Jiang Baichen , Kassoh Fallah Samuel , Srisukwatanachai Tanapon 

TITLE=Chinese and Thai consumers’ willingness to pay for quality rice attributes: a discrete choice experiment method

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1270331

DOI=10.3389/fsufs.2023.1270331

ISSN=2571-581X

ABSTRACT=Food safety scandals have heightened the general public concern about food quality, safety, and environmental friendliness in food markets globally. Several studies have ascertained that consumers are willing to pay a premium price for food products with quality and safety information labels. However, most of these studies were country-specific, while few studies have investigated consumer preferences in a comparative context. In this study, we employed Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) to examine 1900 Chinese and 2986 Thai consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for brand, traceability, green, and organic certification labels on rice. A mixed logit model (MXL) was used to compute consumers' WTP. The results demonstrated that both consumers preferred green and organic certified labels. However, Chinese consumers' preference for green and organic certified rice outweighs that of Thai consumers. For brand labels, green and organic certifications, Thai consumers are WTP more than the Chinese due to awareness and trust. Whereas, Chinese consumers are WTP more for information with traceability label than Thai because of the increase in household income and health consciousness.The MXL also showed that trust, income, and age are factors associated with consumers' preferences for certified rice in both countries. To boost consumers' preferences for certified rice, relevant stakeholders need to implement the practice of brand, traceability, and certification labels in the rice value chain.