Consumer attitudes toward low stake risk in food markets

Consistency of quality is viewed as important for producers of consumer goods. However, there is no literature testing the importance of quality consistency on consumers’ willingness to pay for consumer goods. We use an experimental auction market to investigate how inconsistency in tenderness affects consumers’ willingness to pay for beef. We find that most consumers are risk averse with respect to sensory quality. Both the average tenderness and the variance of tenderness affected the consumers’ willingness to pay for beef. Reducing the uncertainty of the sensory quality by categorizing the beef into three tenderness classes increased the total value of the beef by 8%.