Linking Consumers’ Food Choice Motives to their Preferences for Insect‐based Food Products: An Application of Integrated Choice and Latent Variable Model in an African Context
研究使用综合选择与潜变量模型分析肯尼亚消费者对昆虫食品的偏好，发现食物选择动机等潜变量显著影响其选择，解决了传统方法中的测量误差和内生性问题。
Abstract Consumers’ attitudes, perceptions, personalities and motives play important roles in shaping their food choices. These factors are not fully observed by analysts, so they should be treated as latent variables. A number of economic studies treat such variables as direct measures of consumers’ food choice behaviour, even though this might introduce measurement error and endogeneity bias. We investigate the latent link between consumers’ preferences and food choice motives ( FCM s) in an African context. We use an integrated choice and latent variable ( ICLV ) model specification for data analysis to recognise the latent nature of the FCM s and address the measurement and bias problems. The data originate from an incentivised discrete choice experiment conducted in Kenya to elicit consumers’ preferences for insect‐based foods. Our findings show that consumers’ preferences and choices are influenced by their latent motivational orientation. The results illustrate the benefit of the ICLV approach in accounting for consumers’ latent preference constructs in food choice and valuation research.