MEASURING U.S. CONSUMER PREFERENCES FOR GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS USING CHOICE MODELING EXPERIMENTS: THE ROLE OF PRICE, PRODUCT BENEFITS AND TECHNOLOGY

Food biotechnology promises to deliver a wide range of enhanced consumer benefits. This study models consumer's willingness to trade-off the potential risks of GM foods with the possibility of extracting significant benefits. The results of the choice modeling experiments reflect how different attributes of price, product benefits, and technology influence consumer demand for genetically modified food products. The results suggest that direct health, environmental, and production related benefits have a positive effect on choice. The results also generally show that genetic modification is viewed negatively, with use of bacterium and animal based genetic modification being viewed more negatively than the use of plant based genetic modification