Ecolabels and the economic recession

Raychaudhuri, Jibonayan and Wossink, Ada (2023) Ecolabels and the economic recession. PLoS One, 18 (12). ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

We examine the effect of the 2008 economic recession on consumers’ observed expenditures for eco-labelled grocery products. Traditional price theory predicts that consumers change their spending during an economic downturn and we would expect the sales share of eco-labelled products to fall since these are relatively more expensive than non-labelled products. We use supermarket loyalty card data from the UK and show that the recession had widely different effects on the expenditure share of different eco-labelled grocery products. We confirm, empirically, that expenditure shares on organic products declined over the time period under study but the expenditures share for fair-trade products increased over the same period. We evaluate alternative models of decision making to explain our results, viz., a salience model and a model of reputation signalling. We find that both of these models give a plausible explanation of our empirical results.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Applied Econometrics And Finance
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	06 Dec 2023 02:20
Last Modified:	19 Dec 2023 04:52
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/93877
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0294167

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