Information Customization and Food Choice

In this article we employ a hypothetical discrete choice experiment (DCE) to examine how much consumers are willing to pay to use technology to customize their food shopping. We conjecture that customized information provision can aid in the composition of a healthier shop. Our results reveal that consumers are prepared to pay relatively more for individual specific information as opposed to generic nutritional information that is typically provided on food labels. In arriving at these results we have examined various model specifications including those that make use of ex-post de-briefing questions on attribute non-attendance and attribute ranking information and those that consider the time taken to complete the survey. Our main results are robust to the various model specifications we examine.