Consumers' willingness to pay for conventional, organic and functional yogurt: evidence from experimental auctions

This research is aimed at investigating consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for conventional, organic and functional yogurts in two different information treatments. The basic information treatment provided respondents with yogurts labelled conventional, organic or functional while the second treatment included additional information. To elicit values for these specific products, 100 Italian consumers participated in an experimental auction using the Vickrey fifth-price sealed-bid mechanism. Findings reveal that providing additional information through a specific health claim increases consumer's perceived value of the functional yogurt, while for the organic counterpart additional information on organic regulation does not add much to the premium. Moreover, our study shows that specific socio-demographic variables (as gender, age, presence of kids in the household and the need to follow a specific diet) positively affect WTP for functional and organic yogurts.