Economic Personalities in Food Choice 

This dissertation tests the effect of various economic personalities on individual food choice. In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between food choice and risk using an online experiment to elicit consumer preferences and test the effects of information on nutritional characteristics and how individual risk attitudes affect the selection of healthier options. This paper is the first to uncover the relationship between risk attitudes and food choice. While other research has focused on generic or “fad” nutritional claims, this study focuses on how advertisement and labeling information of actual nutritional attributes impacts consumer choice, and how consumer risk preferences affect their willingness to pay for nutritional attributes, based on the framing of the label presented. I find that information interventions induced a negative effect on consumer willingness to pay for the item, regardless of consumer risk preference.

 

I extend this analysis into my second chapter, which further explores the relationship of risk attitudes and food choice. As it stands, current risk elicitation measures tend to be generic and not specific to food choices. This means that these measures cannot fully capture risk attitudes towards nutrition. In this paper, I develop and test a novel risk elicitation measure that captures risk attitudes specific to the nutrition domain.  Overall, I find strong support that latent risk attitudes about nutrition significantly affect food choice, and this measure outperforms standard risk elicitation measures in predicting food choices, dietary behaviors, beliefs, and label usage.

 

In my final chapter, co-authored with Dr. Sinne Smed (University of Copenhagen), we use Danish registry data to investigate the intersection of habits, stress, and self-control on food choices. While much of the literature addresses these traits in isolation, few studies recognize the combined effect of stress, habits, and self-control on food choices. We borrow from the psychology literature to measure stress and self-control. Next, we use frequency of consumers' past purchases to create our novel Healthy and Unhealthy Habit Indices. Our work is the first to distinguish between type of habit (good vs. bad) in decision-making. We find no evidence that stress impacts food choice and that self-control is a significant predictor of healthy food choice, but this effect disappears once we control for habitual behavior.