Online Experimental Auctions for Sustainable Food Choices

Understanding customers’ preferences for sustainable food products is critical for designing effective farm-to-fork strategies and supporting the adoption of novel food technologies. Experimental auctions, based on (multi-unit) Vickrey auctions, offer an incentive compatible method for eliciting willingness-to-pay for such products. In this paper, we explore a novel way of conducting experimental auctions of sustainably produced food using online communities of potential consumers. We discuss methodological challenges, including unbiased demand estimation, and broad and representative participant recruitment. We also propose a new statistical method to estimate treatment effects on optimal mark-ups. We further illustrate the applicability of online experimental auctions through a case study on consumer valuation of food processed using ‘electroporation’ technologies.