An Analysis of Consumer Preferences for Information Sources on Food Safety by using Fuzzy Pair-wise Comparison

The main objective of this study is to measure consumer preferences for information sources on food safety along with the factors influencing the degree of consumer preferences in Turkey. The data were obtained from a survey of 385 consumers selected randomly in Izmir, Turkey. This study involves two-stage methodology. In the first stage, fuzzy pair-wise comparison was applied to calculate a measure of preferences. Five information sources on food safety, television programmes, doctors/experts, newspapers/journal articles, radio programmes and neighbors/friends were given to the consumers. The consumers were asked to make pair-wise comparisons among the information sources. The information source hierarchies of consumers were established and ranked from most to least importance. The results show that the most important information sources of consumers are “doctors/experts” and “television programmes”. The consumer preferences from the first stage were regressed upon the consumer specific variables by using seemingly unrelated regression in the second stage. The preferences for information sources are mainly influenced by education and level of income