Determinants of consumers’ choice in Italian pasta market

The aim of this paper is the estimation of a Multinomial Logit model to analyse customers’ preferences in the pasta market towards different brands. Using individual sales data from a supermarket, located in the province of Venice, the model was applied to estimate the probability of purchase of each pasta brand based on the different characteristics of both product (such as price and quality) and customer. The results indicate that pasta market is a very simple one, in which the choice is actually influenced by price and quality and that these two variables affect the customers’ purchasing decision in a very different way as the brand changes.