Do Ethical Consumers Care About Price? A Revealed Preference Analysis of Fair Trade Coffee Purchases
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The existing literature on socially responsible purchasing relies heavily on stated preference measures elicited through surveys that utilize hypothetical market choices. This paper explores consumers' revealed purchasing behavior with regard to fair trade coffee and is apparently the first to do so in an actual market setting. In a series of experiments, we investigated differences in consumer responsiveness to relative price changes in fair trade and non‐fair trade brewed coffees. In order to minimize the hypothetical bias that may be present in some experimental settings, we conducted our experiments in cooperation with a vendor who allowed us to vary prices in an actual coffee shop. Using a choice model, we found that purchasers of fair trade coffee were much less price responsive than those of other coffee products. The demonstration of low sensitivity to price suggests that the market premiums identified by stated preference studies do indeed exist and are not merely artifacts of hypothetical settings. La littérature existante sur la consommation responsable repose fortement sur les mesures des préférences déclarées recueillies lors d'enquêtes utilisant des choix hypothétiques. Le présent article examine le comportement d'achat révélé des consommateurs concernant le cafééquitable et constitue apparemment le premier article du genre à le faire dans le contexte d'un marché réel. Au cours d'une série d'expériences, nous avons examiné les différentes réactions des consommateurs concernant les changements du prix relatif des cafés infusés équitables et classiques (non équitables). Pour minimiser le biais hypothétique qui pourrait exister dans certaines situations expérimentales, nous avons effectué nos expériences en collaboration avec un fournisseur qui nous a donné la permission de modifier les prix dans un véritable café‐restaurant. À l'aide d'un modèle de choix, nos résultats ont montré que les consommateurs de cafééquitable réagissaient beaucoup moins au prix que les consommateurs de café classique. Cette faible sensibilité au prix donne à penser que les primes de marché identifiées dans les études sur les préférences déclarées existent effectivement et qu'elles ne sont pas de simples phénomènes de situations hypothétiques.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it