Revisiting Consumers' Valuation for Local Versus Organic Food Using a Non-Hypothetical Choice Experiment: Does Personality Matter?

We investigate consumer’s preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for local and organic foods using a non-hypothetical choice experiment. Past studies observed that beliefs and attitudes affect consumers’ preferences local and organic productions claims. However, in psychology, personality is an important factor in explaining individuals’ attitudes and behavior, since personality traits are stable features which capture the differences in "patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving" (APA, 2014). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the interaction between personality traits and consumer preferences for both local and organic food products. We used apple sauce as product in question and we implemented the MIDI (Midlife Development Inventory) scale to capture respondents’ personalities. We focused in particular on the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. We find that personality traits can be sources of heterogeneity in consumer preferences for organic and particularly locally produced apple sauce.