FOOD VALUES

JAYSON L. LUSK AND BRIAN C. BRIGGEMAN

Because of the potential malleability of stated and revealed preferences for new food technologies
and attributes, this research sought to determine consumers’ food value systems by utilizing recent
advances in best-worst scaling. Based on previous literature related to human values and food prefer-
ences, a list of eleven food values was compiled. Results reveal that on average the values of safety,
nutrition, taste, and price were among the most important to consumers, whereas the values of fairness,
tradition, and origin were among the least important; however, there was significant heterogeneity in
the relative importance placed on food values. Results indicate that food values are significantly related
to consumers’ stated and revealed preferences for organic food.

Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014

Key words: best-worst scaling, maximum-difference scaling, organic, preferences.

Each time a new food technology is developed,
a new brand advertised, or a food policy de-
bated, there is an associated spike in research
eliciting consumer preferences for the partic-
ular product or attribute in question. Exam-
ples include numerous papers on genetically
modified food, hormone use in meat produc-
tion, food irradiation, nutrition, ecofriendly
products, etc. When studying future food poli-
cies and technologies, an important question is
whether researchers must begin anew and treat
each new product or product attribute as inde-
pendent. Do consumers have some stable set of
meta-preferences or food-specific values that
drive preferences for food product attributes?
Economists have traditionally refrained
from drawing a sharp distinction between val-
ues and preferences. The neoclassical view is
that consumers make choices based on their
preferences. In turn, observed choices can be
used to infer people’s preferences. As pointed
out by McFadden (2001) and others, such con-
sumer theory is virtually tautological: pref-
erences explain choices and given price and
income constraints, choices explain prefer-
ences. A critical underlying assumption in this
framework is that preferences are complete
and stable. Research, however, suggests that
preferences, the construct that defines choice,
may not be as stable as posited by this theory.
It appears that people’s choices and thus pref-
erences can be affected by the frame and con-
Lusk is professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair and Brigge-
man is assistant professor, both in the Department of Agricultural
Economics, Oklahoma State University.
The authors thank Jaebong Chang for assistance with survey
administration and data entry and three anonymous reviewers for
helpful comments on the article.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ. 91(1) (February 2009): 184–196
Copyright 2008 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8276.2008.01175.x
text of the decision task (e.g., Fishhoff 1993;
Kahneman and Tversky 2000) and that peo-
ple use trial-and-error learning to “discover”
preferences (e.g., Shogren, List, and Hayes
2000).
In demand theory it is assumed that when
a consumer evaluates two consumption bun-
dles, x and y, they can identify which bundle is
preferred to the other or whether they are in-
different. The consumer then takes this prefer-
ence ordering, expressed via a utility function,
and maximizes utility subject to a budget con-
straint. As described by Varian (1982, 1983),
if a consumer prefers x to y in one time pe-
riod but then in another prefers y to x, then
the consumer has violated the axioms of re-
vealed preference theory (assuming prices are
unchanged). Such a violation implies behav-
ior inconsistent with maximization of a stable
utility function. This means, for example, that
preferences measured in one time period are
no longer of use in predicting demand or calcu-
lating welfare changes in another time period.
The importance of such preference instability
can be noted, for example, by the significant
amount of attention devoted to determining
whether there was a structural change in meat
demand and whether the weak axiom of reveal
preferences (WARP) had been violated (e.g.,
Chalfant and Alson 1988; Eales and Unnevehr
1993; Moschini and Meilke 1989). When in-
terest lies in determining preferences for new
or unfamiliar goods, it is quite possible to ob-
serve the kinds of preference reversals dis-
cussed above.
These observations have led some social sci-
entists (e.g., Hechter 1993), including some no-
table economists (e.g., Becker 1976), to draw
Lusk and Briggeman
a distinction between potentially malleable
preferences (the construct defining choices be-
tween market goods) and more stable val-
ues. Becker (1976) refers to these values as
“underlying preferences.” He argues, “The
preferences that are assumed to be stable do
not refer to market goods and services . . . but
to underlying objects of choice. . . . These un-
derlying preferences are defined over funda-
mental aspects of life, such as health, prestige,
sensual pleasure, benevolence, or envy, that do
not always bear a stable relation to market
goods and services.” For example, the assump-
tion is not that people’s preference ranking of
nongenetically modified food over genetically
modified food is stable, but rather the more sta-
ble preferences are for the outcomes that are
expected to disseminate from eating nongenet-
ically modified instead of genetically modified
food.
Although values are generally conceptual-
ized as relating to abstract end states of ex-
istence, a prudent question is whether there
might exist a set of intermediary values that
relate specifically to people’s food choices, val-
ues that are perhaps more stable than people’s
preference ranking of a specific set of foods or
food attributes. The concept of such intermedi-
ary values is, in fact, well ingrained in the con-
ceptual framework related to means-end chain
theory (Gutman 1982), a framework used by
psychologists and marketers that links people’s
beliefs about concrete product attributes with
the abstract values.
A primary purpose of this article is to iden-
tify consumers’ food value systems. That is, we
aim to identify people’s beliefs regarding the
preferability of competing outcomes resulting
from food purchase and consumption along
a continuum of relative importance. One of
the primary impediments in empirically study-
ing an issue like food values is measurement.
Economists have historically shied away from
directly measuring constructs that are not di-
rectly observable (e.g., Colander 2007). A pri-
mary concern is that people do not always
use measurement scales identically, causing
difficulties in interpersonal and cross-cultural
comparisons (e.g., Steenkamp and Baumgart-
ner 1998). Thus, a second primary purpose of
this article is to apply recent advances in the
field of best-worst scaling (sometimes referred
to as maximum-difference scaling) to value
measurement. This approach permits the mea-
surement of food values on a ratio scale by
observing people’s choices of which values are
most and least important. Finally, this article
Food Values 185
investigates the validity of measured values by
investigating their relationship to stated and
revealed preferences for organic food.
Background and Development
of Food Values
In his seminal work on the issue, Rokeach
(1973) defined a value as “an enduring belief
that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of
existence is personally or socially preferable
to an opposite or converse mode of conduct
or end-state of existence. A value system is
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
an enduring organization of beliefs concerning
preferable modes of conduct or end-states of
existence along a continuum of relative im-
portance.” He developed a set of eighteen
terminal values—values such as “a comfort-
able life,” “inner harmony,” “pleasure,” and
“wisdom” that relate to desirable end states of
existence and another set of eighteen instru-
mental values—values such as “ambitious,”
“honest,” and “self-control” that relate to de-
sirable modes of conduct that lead to partic-
ular end states. Rokeach proposed a method
to measure the relative importance of these
values that involved a straightforward rank-
ing task. He and others have shown that
such values have considerable power in ex-
plaining variations in wide range of individual
behaviors.
More recent work, such as that conducted
by Schwartz (1992), has focused on other
value classification systems. Schwartz classi-
fied values into the following ten categories:
achievement, benevolence, conformity, hedo-
nism, power, security, self-direction, stimula-
tion, tradition, and universalism. Some of these
value categories do not have a direct relation to
food (i.e., power and achievement), but many
are of direct relevance. For example, people
for whom benevolence is an important value
might be concerned about how their food con-
sumption affects others in the supply chain;
people for whom hedonism is important may
care a great deal about taste and visual ap-
peal; people concerned about security will not
likely want to consume foods that will cause
illness and financial harm; and people who de-
sire stimulation (i.e., excitement and novelty)
will not likely be as concerned about new tech-
nologies, etc.
Values research has gained widespread
use in marketing research due to the de-
velopment of means-end chain theory (e.g.,
Gutman 1982), which argues that a set of core
186 February 2009
underlying values motivate consumers’ pur-
chasing decisions. Buying a particular prod-
uct or product attribute is conceptualized
as a means to obtain some desirable end
state. Means-end chain theory, along with the
empirical approach of measuring means-end
chains called laddering, is widely used by firms
for market segmentation and in developing
advertising and promotional strategies (e.g.,
Reynolds and Gutman 1988; Gengler, Mul-
vey, and Oglethorpe 1999). With the ladder-
ing approach consumers are shown a variety of
competing products and asked to identify why
they might choose one product over another.
The typical answer involves the identification
of a product attribute such as package size, nu-
tritional content, etc. Then, a monitor asks a
question such as, “Why is that important to
you?” Once an answer is provided, consumers
are further encouraged to state more abstract
reasons for why an attribute is important to
them, until they respond with a terminal value
of the sort described by Rokeach (1973), or un-
til the consumer cannot state a more abstract
reason. Common answers across consumers
are classified into means-end chains. Examples
of the use of means-end chain analysis related
to food product marketing and food policy can
be found in the work of Bredahl (1999, 2001)
on genetically modified food and Makatouni
(2002) and Padel and Foster (2005) on organic
food.
Measuring consumers’ values and means-
end chains represents an explicit attempt to
identify why consumers prefer a particular
product over another. Some have argued that
economists should refrain from attempting to
determine why consumers choose one product
over another (e.g., Gul and Pesendorfer 2005).
However, regulatory agencies must often de-
termine the criteria or standards that foods
must meet to be called organic, grass-fed, natu-
ral, etc. Such decisions implicitly involve judg-
ment calls about the underlying values that
each of these claims aim to support. For ex-
ample, one set of criteria might be optimal if
consumers primarily buy organic because they
believe it safer than traditional food. A differ-
ent set of criteria would likely be optimal if
consumers desired organics because they be-
lieve such foods improve the environment. As
argued by Lusk et al. (2006), in the context of
country of origin labeling, knowing why con-
sumers prefer a particular attribute is critical
in knowing whether a market failure exists and
thus whether public policy is needed. In the
case of organic food, for example, if such prod-
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
ucts are bought for private-safety reasons, gov-
ernment intervention in the market may be un-
necessary, but if bought to help eliminate en-
vironmental externalities, intervention may be
warranted. Of course, firm advertising would
benefit substantially from knowing why con-
sumers buy certain products, such that adver-
tisements and promotional campaigns can be
tailored to the value being served.
Although means-end chain analyses typi-
cally focus on linking product attributes to
end states of existence, in many cases these
are too abstract to be of practical relevance
for food policy or advertising. However, the
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
typical laddering approach elicits a number of
intermediary values along the chain to the fi-
nal end states of existence. It is here that we
argue for the development of a set of food-
specific intermediary values. Selecting the par-
ticular items to include as a potential set of
food-specific values is no easy task; many pre-
vious articles have asked consumers to rank
their concern for a variety of food technolo-
gies (e.g., Hwang, Roe, and Teisl 2005), food
safety issues (e.g., Finn and Louviere 1992), or
food attributes (e.g., Baker 1999). These ap-
proaches, while useful in their own right, are
too specific to be broadly applied when ex-
plaining consumers’ choices across a variety
of foods. Further, such studies often measure
people’s preferences for technologies or con-
cepts that are relatively novel or unfamiliar
and for which people do not likely have well-
formed preferences.
The approach taken in this article was to re-
view the extant literature on consumers’ will-
ingness to pay for food products and stud-
ies conducting food-related means-end chain
analyses to identify a set of food values that are
likely to be relatively stable across time. The
idea is not to identify food attributes per se, but
rather more abstract attributes, consequences
and “end states” of food consumption that are
potentially applicable in explaining choices be-
tween a wide range of food products. The list
of food values that we compiled along with de-
scriptions shown to consumers in our empirical
analysis is shown in table 1.
Some of the items in table 1 could be con-
sidered product attributes (e.g., convenience,
nutrition, taste, etc.). However, in each case,
the value in table 1 is a more abstract con-
struct potentially representing numerous phys-
ical product attributes. For example, several
studies have investigated people’s preferences
for fat content and vitamins in food; however,
all of these studies are related to the concept of
Lusk and Briggeman
Table 1. Food Values and Descriptions
Value
Naturalness (extent to which food is produced
without modern technologies)
Taste (extent to which consumption of the food is
appealing to the senses)
Price (the price that is paid for the food)
Safety (extent to which consumption of food will
not cause illness)
Convenience (ease with which food is cooked
and/or consumed)
Nutrition (amount and type of fat, protein,
vitamins, etc.)
Tradition (preserving traditional consumption
patterns)
Origin (where the agricultural commodities were
grown)
Fairness (the extent to which all parties involved in
the production of the food equally benefit)
Appearance (extent to which food looks
appealing)
Environmental Impact (effect of food production
on the environment)
nutrition. Although consumers may not have
well-defined preferences over Vitamin A con-
tent versus content of Vitamin B12, they are
much more likely to know whether nutrition,
generally, is more or less important than, say,
price. That is, people’s relative value for “nutri-
tion” is likely to be much more stable and well-
reasoned than people’s relative preferences for
Vitamin A versus Vitamin B12 or Omega 3
fatty acid versus conjugated linoleic acid. We
purposely refrained from selecting terms such
as “food quality,” which were too abstract to
be operationally meaningful. Some of the val-
ues, such as origin, do relate to specific food at-
tributes, but also have broader consequences
with outcomes related to the community and
with values related to ethnocentrism that are
not likely captured by other values. As with
Rokeach’s (1973) terminal values, the values in
table 1 can be classified as either personal (i.e.,
self-centered) or social (i.e., society-centered).
The values of tradition, origin, fairness, and en-
vironmental impact would fall into the latter
category.
The values shown in table 1 are reasonably
comprehensive in covering the breadth of is-
sues likely to motivate consumer food choice,
and they undoubtedly capture the major val-
ues describing food choice. Still, we are under
no illusion that other researchers might have
generated a slightly different list had they un-
dertaken the same task. Our response is the
Food Values 187
same as Rokeach’s (1973): “The overall pro-
cedure employed in selecting the two lists is
admittedly an intuitive one, and there is no rea-
son to think that others working independently
would have come up with precisely the same
list of . . . values. It would be interesting to see
which values others might produce working in-
dependently.”
In the following we describe the approach
we use to measure the relative importance
consumers place on the values in table 1 and
identify whether the measured values have ex-
planatory power in explaining food choice.
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
Data and Methods
To determine the relative importance con-
sumers place on the values in table 1, we uti-
lized recent advances in best-worst scaling. The
method was originally introduced by Finn and
Louviere (1992), and the theoretical properties
of probabilistic, best-worst choice models were
recently elucidated by Marley and Louviere
(2005). The method is rapidly gaining popular-
ity in business-marketing research (e.g., Saw-
tooth Software 2007) and has been recently
been applied to health care issues (Flynn et al.
2007) and to measure ethical beliefs in an inter-
national context (Auger, Devinney, and Lou-
viere 2007). Lee, Soutar, and Louviere (2007)
have even applied the best-worst approach to
measuring people’s overall life values. Their
results suggested that the best-worst approach
provides a better measure of people’s values
than some frequently used rating approaches.
The best-worst method works as follows:
consumers are shown a set of items and are
asked to indicate which is best (or most impor-
tant) and which is worst (or least important).
Consumers make several repeated choices
where the set of items varies across questions.
Responses to the questions can be used to
measure each item’s position on a continuum
of the construct of interest—“importance” in
this case. Figure 1 provides an example of
one of the best-worst questions used in our
application.
Best-worst scaling has several advantages
over other methods of measurement. A major
difficulty with rating-based methods (where a
person responds on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 be-
ing not important and 5 being very important)
is that people are not forced to make trade-
offs between the relative importance of issues.
Indeed, it is common for people to say all is-
sues are “important.” Another problem with
188 February 2009 Amer. J. Agr. Econ.

Which of the following issues is most important and which is least important when you
purchase food? (check only one issue as the most important and one as the least important)
Most Least
Important Important
Taste
(extent to which consumption of the food is appealing to the senses)
Price
(the price that is paid for the food)
Safety
(extent to which consumption of food will not cause illness)
Convenience
(ease with which food is cooked and/or consumed)
Nutrition
(amount and type of fat, protein, vitamins, etc.)
Environmental Impact
(effect of food production on the environment)

Figure 1. Example of best-worst question

Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014

rating-based methods is that different peo-
ple use the scale differently, with a 5 for one
person possibly representing a 4 for another.
At best these measures provide measurement
on an ordinal scale. Best-worst scaling avoids
these pitfalls. By having people choose the best
and worst options, people are forced to de-
cide which issues are more or less important,
and unlike rating scales, there is only one way
for people to respond to the question (with a
choice).
Best-worst scaling is an extension of Thur-
stone’s (1927) paired comparison method,
which has a long history in psychological re-
search. In the paired comparison method peo-
ple are simply presented two items and are
asked which is best (or more important). Best-
worst scaling provides much more information
than paired-comparisons, so much so, that it
is possible to construct individual-level scales
and provide a measurement of the underlying
construct on a ratio scale.
As shown in table 1, there are eleven food
values of interest. The challenge was how to al-
locate these eleven values to different choice
sets in a survey. We used a 211 main-effects or-
thogonal experimental design to assign each of
the eleven values to choice sets.1 The resulting
design consisted of twelve choice sets. Thus,
each respondent in our study answered twelve
best-worst questions. Of the twelve choice sets,
six contained four values, three contained six
values, and three contained eight values. Each
of the food values appeared six times across
the twelve choice sets. In summary, each sur-
vey contained all twelve choice sets, and con-
sumers were asked to indicate the most impor-
tant and least important issue for each set as
shown in figure 1.2
Survey
To implement the best-worst scaling approach,
we created a mail survey that was sent to a ran-
dom sample of 2,000 households in the spring
of 2007. A postcard reminder was sent approxi-
mately two weeks after the initial mailing. Two-
hundred and twenty people responded to the
survey, which after accounting for undeliver-
able addresses implies a response rate of about
11.4%. Some people did not answer all survey
questions or answered some questions incor-
rectly, leaving a total of 176 surveys available
for analysis. Table 2 provides summary statis-
tics for the respondents included in our analy-
sis. Most of the respondents were male (65%)
and had a college degree (61%). Average age
was about fifty-six years, and average house-
hold income was about $74,000. As shown in
the last four rows of the table, respondents
were fairly well dispersed across the United
States.3

1 concern with people’s hypothetical choices in the best-worst scaling
The experimental design we used is the same as that shown in
the appendix of Finn and Louviere (1992), with the food values in
table 1 substituted in place of the societal issues studied by Finn
and Louviere. This design, while having many advantageous prop-
erties, produces choice sets of unequal size (e.g., in one question
a respondent has to choose the best and worst out of four items,
whereas in a subsequent question a respondent has to choose the
best and worst out of six items). Other experimental designs, such
as balanced incomplete block designs, have the potential to over-
come this relative weakness such that the choice set sizes, while
varying across surveys, are constant within a survey.
2
Given the literature on hypothetical bias, there may be some
exercise. However, previous research has shown that in discrete
choice conjoint applications, there is little or no hypothetical bias
in marginal willingness to pay (e.g., Carlsson and Martinsson 2001;
Lusk and Schroeder 2004). Thus, the hypothetical nature of our
decision task may not be terribly problematic as all choices involve
trade-offs between competing food values.
3
Despite the fact that our sample averages for education and
income are higher than the averages for the U.S. population, we find
that demographic characteristics have little influence on people’s
food values.
Lusk and Briggeman
Table 2. Characteristics of Survey Respondents
Variable Definition
Gender 1 if female; 0 if male
Age Age in years
Degree 1 if obtained college degree; 0 otherwise
Child 1 if child under age of 12 living in household; 0 otherwise
Income Annual household income in $1,000s
West 1 if resides in West U.S. census region; 0 otherwise
Midwest 1 if resides in Midwest U.S. census region; 0 otherwise
South 1 if resides in South U.S. census region; 0 otherwise
Northeast 1 if resides in Northeast U.S. census region; 0 otherwise
Note: Number of observations is 176.
Econometric Analysis
When responding to each best-worst question,
consumers can be conceptualized as choos-
ing the two items that maximize the differ-
ence between two items on an underlying scale
of importance. If a choice set has J items, or
values in this case, then there are J(J − 1)
possible best-worst combinations a person
could choose. The particular pair of items cho-
sen by the consumer as best and worst, then,
represents a choice out of all J(J − 1) pos-
sible pairs that maximizes the difference in
importance.4
Formally, let j represent the location of
value j on the underlying scale of importance,
and let the true or latent unobserved level of
importance for individual i be given by I ij =
j + ε ij , where ε ij is a random error term.
The probability that the consumer chooses, say,
item j and item k, as the best and worst, re-
spectively, out of a choice set with J items, is
the probability that the difference in I ij and
I ik is greater than all other J(J − 1) − 1 pos-
sible differences in the choice set. If the ε ij
are distributed i.i.d. type I extreme value, then
this probability takes the familiar multinomial-
logit (MNL) form:
4
Although the approach described in his section is appealing
from a conceptual standpoint, some may find it difficult to im-
plement. Fortunately, there is a much simpler and straightforward
(though somewhat less conceptually appealing) approach to deter-
mine the relative importance of food values. In particular, a log-
interval scale of importance can be constructed simply by counting
the number of times a person chooses a particular value as most
important and subtracting it from the number of times a person
chooses the value as least important across the 12 choice sets. We
have created a technical appendix (Lusk and Briggeman 2008) to
show the results from such a “counting” analysis and to illustrate
how cluster analysis can be used to group individuals based on
these count-based value estimates.
Food Values 189
Standard
Mean Deviation
0.351 0.479
55.604 15.263
0.611 0.489
0.166 0.373
74.044 37.567
0.201 0.402
0.339 0.475
0.282 0.451
0.178 0.384
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
(1)
Prob( j is chosen best and k chosen worst)
e j −k
= J J .
l −m − J
l=1 m=1 e
The parameters j can be estimated by maxi-
mization of the log-likelihood function based
on the probability statement in (1). That is, the
dependent variable takes the value of 1 for the
pair of values chosen by the consumer as best
and worst, and a 0 for the reaming J(J − 1) −
1 pairs of items in the choice set that were not
choicen as best and worst. The estimated j
represents the importance of value j relative
to some value that was normalized to zero to
prevent the “dummy variable trap.”
One of the primary objectives of this article
is to determine how values affect preferences
for food, and as such, we need information
on each individual’s values. Unfortunately, the
MNL described in equation (1) assumes that
all individuals in the sample place the same
level of importance on each value (i.e., there is
no i subscript on j ). To overcome this weak-
ness of the MNL, we also estimated a random
parameters model (RPL). In particular, let the
importance parameter for individual i and is-
sue j be specified as ˜ i j = ¯ j +  j i j , where
¯ j and  j are the mean and standard devia-
tion of j in the population, and i is a random
term normally distributed with mean zero and
unit standard deviation. Such a specification
implies that the importance of food value j is
assumed to be distributed according to a nor-
mal distribution with mean ¯ j and standard
deviation  j . Substituting ˜ i j = ¯ j +  j i j into
equation (1) yields a probability statement that
depends on the random term in ij . Rather
than attempting to explicitly integrate over
190 February 2009
these random terms, following Train (2003),
the model was estimated via simulation. In par-
ticular, the parameters were estimated by max-
imizing a simulated log-likelihood function,
evaluated at 200 pseudorandom Halton draws
for ij . The random draws are individual-
specific, which takes into consideration the
fact that each person answered twelve best-
worst questions. Train (2003) provides more
information on computational details for the
RPL.
One of the underlying assumptions of the
RPL is that the variance of ε ij is assumed to
equal one. It is possible, however, for the scale
to differ by people or alternatives (Louviere
2001). The RPL model outlined above can be
also interpreted as an error-component model
where each alternative (or food value) has a
separate variance (e.g., Train 2003), and as such
the model accommodates differences in po-
tential scale over alternatives. Given the nor-
malization of the variance of ε ij to one, how-
ever, it is possible that the mean estimates
of j remain confounded with differences in
scale, and as such, it is important to recognize
that the estimated population parameters re-
flect both differences in mean and scale. Fortu-
nately, McFadden and Train (2000) have shown
that the RPL can approximate any underlying
random utility model, and as such, the RPL can
produce goods estimate of predicted probabil-
ities, even if the there is some misspecification
in the choice model.
Given the potential confound with scale,
we calculate a “share of preference” for each
food value, which is the forecasted probabil-
ity that each food value is picked as most
important:
(2) share of preference for value j
eˆ j
= J .
k=1 eˆ l
These shares of preferences must sum to one
across all eleven food values. Equation (2) re-
ports the importance of the value j on a ratio
scale, meaning that if one value has a share
value twice that of another value, it can accu-
rately be said that the former value is twice
as important as the latter. It is important to
note that the calculated share of preference
for a food value will reflect both true impor-
tance of the value as well as relative uncer-
tainty in the importance people place on the
value; however, the share of preference calcu-
lations convey a key message—the probability
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
that an issue is picked as more important than
another.
As shown by Train (2003) and Huber
and Train (2001), once the parameters from
the RPL are estimated, so-called individual-
specific estimates can be obtained by using the
estimated parameters as a prior and using each
person’s actual choices to form an individual-
specific posterior estimate. These posterior es-
timates of food values for each individual can
be compared with each person’s stated and re-
vealed preferences for organic food to deter-
mine if relationships among the variables exist.
It is important to note that these Bayesian cal-
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
culations do not produce each person’s value
parameters per se, but rather as discussed thor-
oughly by Train (2003), they are the means
of the conditional distribution (conditional on
the person’s actual choice), which are not nec-
essarily the same as person’s actual coeffi-
cients. As Train (2003) shows, however, the dif-
ference between these two statistics becomes
small when people face even ten choice situa-
tions and he further shows that such individual-
level Bayesian estimates improve the ability to
predict the choices that each person actually
makes. Thus, while we use the term individual-
specific values, the estimates are, more pre-
cisely, the mean of the parameter distribu-
tion conditioned on each individual’s actual
choices.
Preferences for Organic Food
To investigate the extent to which differences
in food values explain differences in prefer-
ences for specific foods, the survey contained
both stated and revealed preference ques-
tions. In the stated preference question respon-
dents were asked to state the largest premium
that they were willing to pay for an organic
loaf of bread over a loaf of bread produced
through conventional, nonorganic means as-
suming both loaves were the same brand name.
A brief definition of organic food was provided
in case people were unaware of the mean-
ing of organic food. A payment-card method
was used to elicit people’s willingness to pay.
That is, people responded to the question by
checking a box that contained several dol-
lar amounts associated with the largest pre-
mium the consumer was willing to pay (e.g., $0,
$0.01 to $0.49, $0.50 to $0.99, etc.). We investi-
gate whether stated willingness to pay for or-
ganic food was related to food values by calcu-
lating the correlations between each person’s
stated willingness-to-pay premium and her/his
Lusk and Briggeman
individual-specific value shares of preferences
obtained from the RPL.
In addition to this stated preference ques-
tion, a revealed preference question was
also asked. In particular, people were asked
whether they had ever purchased an organic
food. Response categories were “yes,” “no,”
and “I don’t know.” For subsequent analysis
people who responded “yes” were classified
as purchasers of organic food, and responses
of “no” or “I don’t know” were classified
as nonpurchasers of organic food.5 To deter-
mine whether food values relate to organic
purchases, we compared the means of the
individual-specific value shares of preferences
obtained from the RPL estimates for pur-
chasers to the same statistic for nonpurchasers
of organic food.
We chose organic food because it is one for
which there are many potential reasons why a
person may buy organic food. Some have hy-
pothesized that food safety concerns are the
primary motivator behind organic food sales,
whereas others argue that the primary moti-
vators are concerns for the environment or
inequity in the agricultural supply chain. By
linking food values to preferences for organic
food, some of these competing hypotheses can
be tested. It should be noted, however, that
there is nothing particularly special about or-
ganic food. In principle people’s food values
might have power in explaining preferences for
any type of food.
Results
Table 3 shows the relative importance of each
of the eleven food values as estimated by the
MNL and the RPL models. The importance of
each food value was estimated relative to ori-
gin (the least important value according to the
estimated models). Results reveal that safety,
on average, is the most important food value
and significantly more important than origin.
Nutrition, taste, and price are the next most
important food values on average, whereas en-
vironment, fairness, and tradition are the least-
important food values. On average natural,
convenience and appearance were of interme-
diary importance but were significantly more
important, on average, than origin. Despite the
averages, results reveal large standard devia-
tions for the importance measures (note: the
MNL restricts the standard deviations to equal
5
Only 7% of respondents responded with “I don’t know.”
Food Values 191
zero), implying that there is significant hetero-
geneity in the sample with regard to relative
importance of food attributes. Indeed, despite
the fact that tradition and origin were the least
important food values, on average, there were
some people in the sample who picked these
issues as most important every time the is-
sue appeared in one of the twelve best-worst
questions.
One interesting observation is that origin
was found to rank last in average importance,
but some previous studies related to beef have
found origin of production to be very impor-
tant to consumers (e.g., Menneke et al. 2007;
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
Loureiro and Umberger 2007). Given recent
attention to the issue of origin in policy cir-
cles, a brief discussion on the discrepancy in
these findings is in order. Previous research
such as that conducted by Loureiro and Um-
berger (2005) showed that U.S. consumers be-
lieve that U.S. beef is safer than foreign beef.
As such, origin is likely to serve as a proxy
for food safety and may even serve as a proxy
for other attributes such as fairness, tradition,
and taste. In previous country-of-origin stud-
ies conducted by Menneke et al. (2007) and
Loureiro and Umberger (2007), it is unclear
whether the measured preferences for origin
were a result of uncontrolled beliefs about dif-
ferences in food safety, tradition, fairness, en-
vironmental impact, etc. across origins.
Our approach explicitly measures prefer-
ences for food safety relative to origin. Because
our study shows food safety as the most im-
portant food value, it is possible that if origin
is a proxy for food safety it too would also be
ranked highly on a list of importance if safety
preferences were not fully disentangled from
preferences from origin. There are also differ-
ences in the way importance is calculated in
previous conjoint studies and in the present
best-worst scaling approach. In the conjoint
studies importance is measured by calculat-
ing the utility difference in the best and worst
levels within an attribute, but in our study
no specific attribute levels are specified, and
the explicit attribute levels used in the previ-
ous conjoint studies may or may not be the
levels that endogenously come to mind for
the consumer. Finally, these previous studies
dealt specifically with beef steaks, whereas our
study deals with food in general and meta-
preferences.
One of the difficulties in evaluating the im-
portance of each value that results from the
MNL and RPL models is that the estimates
themselves have no natural interpretation. To
192 February 2009 Amer. J. Agr. Econ.

Table 3. Relative Importance of Food Values

Econometric Estimates Shares of Preference
Value MNL RPL MNL RPL
∗a ∗
Safety 2.564 3.785 0.268 0.342
(0.088)b (0.157) [0.000] [0.308]
[0.000]c [2.106]
Nutrition 2.176∗ 3.192∗ 0.182 0.139
(0.087) (0.115) [0.000] [0.116]
[0.000] [0.428]
Taste 2.156∗ 3.104∗ 0.178 0.172
(0.086) (0.127) [0.000] [0.185]
[0.000] [1.251]
Price 2.021∗ 3.104∗ 0.156 0.215

Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014

(0.087) (0.154) [0.000] [0.245]
[0.000] [1.834]
Natural 0.721∗ 0.983∗ 0.042 0.026
(0.082) (0.114) [0.000] [0.045]
[0.000] [1.182]
Convenience 0.595∗ 0.847∗ 0.037 0.017
(0.082) (0.108) [0.000] [0.022]
[0.000] [0.804]
Appearance 0.592∗ 0.909∗ 0.037 0.019
(0.079) (0.104) [0.000] [0.025]
[0.000] [0.836]
Environment 0.502∗ 0.709∗ 0.034 0.029
(0.080) (0.119) [0.000] [0.061]
[0.000] [1.544]
Fairness 0.090 0.294∗ 0.023 0.015
(0.078) (0.112) [0.000] [0.029]
[0.000] [1.254]
Tradition 0.071 0.168 0.022 0.021
(0.078) (0.127) [0.000] [0.052]
[0.000] [1.695]
Origin 0.000 0.000 0.021 0.005
[0.000] [0.004]
N individuals 176 176
N choices 2076 2076
Log likelihood −5129.4 −4405.4
Pseudo R2 0.383 0.471
a Oneasterisk (∗) implies mean importance of the value is statistically different from origin at p = 0.05 level.
b Numbers in parentheses ( ) are standard errors.
c Numbers in brackets [ ] are standard deviations.

remedy this problem, the last two columns in
table 3 report the shares of preference for
each value as calculated using equation (2).
According to the RPL model, about 34.2%
of people would rate safety as the most im-
portant food value. Interestingly, price has the
next highest share of preference, with 21.5%
of people on average believing price to be the
most important value. Although nutrition and
taste are important to consumers, food safety
is about twice as important as these two values.
Less than 3% of people would pick any of the
remaining food values (natural, convenience,
appearance, environment, fairness, tradition,
or origin) as most important. Nevertheless, it
appears that natural and the environment are
one-and-a-half to two times as important as
convenience and fairness, and more than five
times as important as origin.
Table 4 reports the correlation between
people’s food values, as determined by the
individual-specific estimates stemming from
the RPL. None of the value estimates exhibit
correlations above 0.5, indicating that each
of the values represents a unique construct.
Still, there are groups of values that appear
to be related. For example, safety and taste
exhibit negative correlations, meaning people
Lusk and Briggeman Food Values 193

Table 4. Pearson Correlations between Food Values from Individual-Specific RPL Estimates
Value 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Safety (1) 1.00
Nutrition (2) 0.02 1.00
Taste (3) −0.10 −0.02 1.00
Price (4) 0.09 0.17 0.24 1.00
Natural (5) −0.04 −0.32 −0.11 −0.16 1.00
Convenience (6) −0.06 −0.04 0.10 0.12 −0.05 1.00
Appearance (7) −0.01 0.10 0.10 0.09 −0.18 0.08 1.00
Environment (8) 0.24 0.09 −0.18 −0.12 0.04 −0.06 −0.15 1.00
Fairness (9) 0.03 0.01 −0.23 −0.19 0.08 −0.29 −0.26 0.23 1.00
Tradition (10) −0.09 0.01 0.29 −0.03 −0.10 0.10 0.23 −0.24 −0.11 1.00

Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014

who believe safety is important are less likely Table 5. Correlations between Shares of
to believe taste is important. One interesting Preferences for Food Values and Stated
finding is that the correlation between safety Willingness-to-Pay Premium for Organic
and naturalness is small and negative. Many Breada
have hypothesized that concern for modern
Pearson Spearman Rank
food technologies is a result of food safety con- Value Correlations Correlations
cerns, but the low correlation between these
two food values suggests otherwise. Interest- Safety 0.029 0.119
ingly, people who place a high importance Nutrition 0.167∗ 0.162∗
on fairness tend to place low values on the Taste −0.102 −0.070
more self-centered values of taste, price, con- Price −0.246∗ −0.306∗
venience, and appearance. Natural 0.234∗ 0.297∗
Convenience 0.020 0.031
The preceding results are useful in identi- Appearance 0.026 0.127
fying the relative importance of food values Environment 0.248∗ 0.187∗
in this somewhat small sample of individuals, Fairness 0.243∗ 0.108
but an important question is whether these Tradition −0.013 0.073
values exhibit explanatory power over these Origin 0.183∗ 0.147∗
people’s choices. To address this issue, con-
Number of observations = 176.
sumers were asked to state how much more a People were assigned a willingness to pay for organic bread of $0, $0.25,
they were willing to pay for organic bread $0.75, $1.25, $1.75, or $2.25 based on their response to an interval-censored,
over nonorganic bread. Table 5 reports Pear- payment card question.
b One asterisk (∗) implies the correlation between willingness to pay a
son and Spearman-rank correlation coeffi- premium for organic bread and the food value is significantly different from
cients between each person’s measured food 0 at p = 0.05 level or lower.
value as determined by the RPL individual-
specific shares of preference and the per-
son’s willingness-to-pay premium for organic and willingness to pay for organic bread, sug-
bread.6 Overall, results are consistent with a gesting that naturalness (defined as extent to
priori expectations. People for whom price is which food is produced without modern tech-
more important stated lower willingness to pay nologies) is a key motivating factor behind
for organic food than people for whom price people’s preferences for organic food. Inter-
is less important. There is a relatively large estingly, one of the factors often attributed
correlation between importance of naturalness to organics—safety—was not significantly re-
lated to stated willingness to pay a premium for
organic food, suggesting safety consideration
6
The willingness to pay for each person was simply determined may not be a driving force behind growth of
by assigning each person the average dollar amount in the range the organic food market. As expected, table 5
checked on the payment card amount (e.g., if the checked premium
range was $1.50–$1.99, the person was assigned a willingness-to- shows that the relative importance of the en-
pay value of $1.75). The Spearman-rank correlation coefficient ex- vironment was positively correlated with will-
plicitly accounts for the fact that this coding scheme only provides ingness to pay a premium for the organic food.
ordinal indications of willingness to pay. We have also estimated
interval-censored regressions, where interval-censored willingness Because responses to contingent valuation
to pay is the dependent variable and the importance of the food questions can be strongly influenced by the
values are independent variables. Overall, findings from these re-
gressions are qualitatively similar to the correlations reported in
frame of the question, including the hypothet-
table. ical nature of the inquiry, we also asked a
194 February 2009 Amer. J. Agr. Econ.

Table 6. Revealed Preferences for Organic fortunately, this means that the measured
Food and Shares of Preferences for Food preferences may be less stable than is often
Values postulated in theoretical models of consumer
decision-making. This article sought to iden-
Shares of Preference
tify a set of food values or meta-attributes
Have Not for which people may have more well-defined
Previously Previously preferences. Implicit in the approach is an at-
Purchased Purchased tempt to crack open the consumer’s “black-
Value Organic Organic box” and provide some insight into why
Safety 0.337 0.368 she/he chooses one product or attribute over
Nutrition 0.130 0.149 another.
Taste 0.169 0.163 Based on previous literature on human val-
Price 0.262∗ 0.177∗ ues and food preferences, a list of eleven food
Natural 0.018∗ 0.049∗ values was compiled. The relative importance

Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014

Convenience 0.019
Appearance 0.021
Environment 0.015∗
Fairness 0.009
Tradition 0.016
Origin 0.005
Number of 64
observations
Number of observations = 176.
One asterisk (∗) implies the hypothesis that the mean values are the same for
people who have and who have not previously purchased organic is rejected
at the p = 0.05 level of significance or lower according to a two-tailed t-test.
revealed preference question by asking peo-
ple whether they had previously purchased or-
ganic food. Across the entire sample, 64% of
respondents indicated they had previously pur-
chased organic food. Table 6 reveals signifi-
cant differences in mean shares of preferences
of those people who have and have not pre-
viously purchased organic food. Overall, re-
sults are very similar to the correlations with
stated preferences reported in table 5. For ex-
ample the mean share of preference for price
was 26.2% for nonpurchasers but 17.7% for
purchasers. That is, price was a less important
attribute for those people who purchased or-
ganic food than for those who had not pre-
viously purchased organic food. Purchases of
organic believed naturalness and the environ-
ment to be significantly more important than
nonpurchasers of organic.
Conclusions
Agricultural economists have devoted a sig-
nificant amount of attention in recent years to
estimating people’s preferences for one food
product attribute over another. Such stud-
ies often focus on measuring preferences for
goods and attributes for which people have
little prior knowledge or experience and un-
0.016 that people placed on each of the food val-
0.017 ues was measured using the relatively new ap-
0.024∗ proach of best-worst scaling, which involves
0.015
0.016
people stating the most and least important
0.006 issue out of a set of competing issues. Results
reveal that the values of safety, nutrition, taste,
112
and price were among the most important to
consumers on average; however, we also found
significant heterogeneity across consumers in
terms of the relative importance placed on
food values.
We found that measured values were signif-
icantly related to stated and revealed prefer-
ences for organic food. People for whom nat-
uralness, fairness and the environment were
more important were more likely to have pre-
viously bought organic food and to state a
higher willingness to pay for organic food. The
opposite was true for people that placed a rela-
tively high level of importance on price. Over-
all, the relative importance people placed on
naturalness, a value that was defined as the ex-
tent to which food is produced without modern
technologies, seemed to have the largest influ-
ence on stated and revealed preferences for
organic food.
The research reported in this article rep-
resents a first attempt at measuring people’s
values for food. More work is needed. First,
if interest lies in identifying the relative im-
portance of food values in the population,
work such as that presented here should be
repeated with a larger and more representa-
tive sample of consumers. Second, this study
only compared the relationship between food
values and preferences for organic food. One
benefit of measuring food values is that they
should have significant explanatory power in
explaining choices between a wide range of
food products, and future research will reveal
whether this is indeed the case. Third, addi-
tional work along the lines of that outlined
above could help predict consumers’ responses
Lusk and Briggeman
to food policy and marketing changes. Small-
scale laboratory research can be used to de-
termine the link consumers make between
specific food attributes, such as use of biotech-
nology, fat content, meat tenderness, etc. and
food values. Then, knowledge of the distri-
bution of food values in the population can
aid in identifying how consumers, in aggre-
gate, will respond to changes in food composi-
tion. Fourth, a benefit of measuring food values
is that these constructs should be more sta-
ble over time; however, even concepts such
as “culture,” which are thought to be rela-
tively impermeable are known to change. This
suggests that there may be some benefit in
tracking a panel of consumers over time, mea-
suring how and when food values change. Fi-
nally, measuring differences in food values
across countries may have significant utility
in explaining international differences in food
consumption patterns and responses to new
food technologies.
[Received July 2007;
accepted April 2008.]
References
Auger, P., T.M. Devinney, and J.J. Louviere. 2007.
“Using Best-Worst Scaling Methodology to
Investigate Consumer Ethical Beliefs across
Countries.” Journal of Business Ethics 70:299–
326.
Baker, G.A. 1999. “Consumer Preferences for Food
Safety Attributes in Fresh Apples: Market Seg-
ments, Consumer Characteristics, and Market-
ing Opportunities.” Journal of Agricultural and
Resource Economics 24:80–97.
Becker, G.S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Hu-
man Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bredahl, L. 1999. “Consumers’ Cognitions with Re-
gard to Genetically Modified Foods. Results of
a Qualitative Study in Four Countries.” Ap-
petite 33:343–60.
——. 2001. “Consumer Attitudes and Decision
Making with Regard to Genetically Engi-
neered Food Products: A Review of the Liter-
ature and a Presentation of Models for Future
Research.” Journal of Consumer Policy 21:23–
61.
Carlsson, F., and P. Martinsson. 2001. “Do Hypo-
thetical and Actual Marginal Willingness to
Pay Differ in Choice Experiments?” Journal
of Environmental Economics and Management
41:179–92.
Food Values 195
Chalfant, J.A., and J.M. Alston. 1988. “Account-
ing for Changes in Tastes.” Journal of Political
Economy 96:391–410.
Colander, D. 2007. “Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and
the Quest to Measure Utility.” Journal of Eco-
nomic Perspectives 21:215–25.
Eales, J.S., and L.J. Unnevehr. 1993. “Simultaneity
and Structural Change in U.S. Meat Demand.”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
75:259–68.
Finn, A., and J.J. Louviere. 1992. “Determining the
Appropriate Response to Evidence of Public
Concern: The Case of Food Safety.” Journal of
Public Policy and Marketing 11:12–25.
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
Fischhoff, B. 1993. “Value Elicitation: Is There Any-
thing There?” In M. Hetchter, L. Nadel, and
R.E. Michod, eds. The Origin of Values. New
York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 187–214.
Flynn, T.N., J.J. Louviere, T.J. Peters, and J. Coast.
2007. “Best-Worst Scaling: What It Can Do for
Health Care Research and How to Do It.” Jour-
nal of Health Economics 26:171–89.
Gengler, C.E., M.S. Mulvey, and J.E. Oglethorpe.
1999. “A Means-End Analysis of Mother’s In-
fant Feeding Choices.” Journal of Public Policy
and Marketing 18:172–88.
Gul, F., and W. Pesendorfer. 2005. “A Case for
Mindless Economics.” Working Paper, Dept.
of Econ., Princeton University. Available at:
http://www.princeton.edu/∼pesendor/mindless.
pdf
Gutman, J. 1982. “A Means-End Chain Model
Based on Consumer Categorization Pro-
cesses.” Journal of Marketing 46:60–72.
Hechter, M. 1993. “Values Research in the So-
cial and Behavioral Sciences.” Hechter, M., L.
Nadel, and R.E Michod (Eds.) The Origin of
Values. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 1–
30.
Huber, J., and K. Train. 2001. “On the Similarity of
Classical and Bayesian Estimates of Individual
Mean Partworths.” Marketing Letters 12:259–
69.
Hwang, Y.-J., B. Roe, and M.F. Teisl. 2005. “An Em-
pirical Analysis of United States Consumers’
Concerns about Eight Food Production and
Processing Technologies.” AgBioForum 8:40–
49.
Kahnemann, D., and A. Tversky. 2000. Choices, Val-
ues, and Frames. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Lee, J.A., G.N. Soutar, and J. Louviere. 2007. “Mea-
suring Values Using Best-Worst Scaling: The
LOV Example.” Psychology and Marketing
24:1043–58.
Loureiro, M.L., and W.J. Umberger. 2005. “As-
sessing Consumer Preferences for Country-of-
196 February 2009
Origin Labeled Products.” Journal of Agricul-
tural and Applied Economics 37:49–63.
——. 2007. “A Choice Experiment Model for
Beef: What US Consumer Responses Tell Us
about Relative Preferences for Food Safety,
Country-of-Origin Labeling and Traceability.”
Food Policy 32:496–514.
Louviere, J.J. 2001. “What If Consumer Experi-
ments Impact Variances as Well as Means?
Response Variability as a Behavioral Phe-
nomenon.” Journal of Consumer Research
28:506–11.
Lusk, J.L., and B.C. Briggeman. 2008. “AJAE Ap-
pendix: Food Values.” Unpublished. Available
at: http://agecon.lib.umn.edu/.
Lusk, J.L., and T.C. Schroeder. 2004. “Are Choice
Experiments Incentive Compatible? A Test
with Quality Differentiated Beef Steaks.”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
86:467–82.
Lusk, J.L., J. Brown, T. Mark, I. Proseku, R. Thom-
son, and J. Welsh. 2006. “Consumer Behavior
and Country of Origin Labeling.” Review of
Agricultural Economics 28:284–92.
Makatouni, A. 2002. “What Motivates Consumers
to Buy Organic Food in the UK? Results
from a Qualitative Study.” British Food Journal
104:345–52.
Marley, A.A.J., and J.J. Louviere. 2005. “Some Prob-
abilistic Models of Best, Worst, and Best-Worst
Choices.” Journal of Mathematical Psychology
49:464–80.
McFadden, D. 2001. “Economic Choices.” Ameri-
can Economic Review 91:351–78.
McFadden, D., and K. Train. 2000. “Mixed MNL
Models of Discrete Response.” Journal of Ap-
plied Econometrics 15:447–70.
Mennecke, B.E., A.M. Townsend, D.J. Hayes, and
S.M. Lonergan. 2007. “A Study of the Fac-
tors that Influence Consumer Attitudes to-
ward Beef Products Using the Conjoint Mar-
ket Analysis Tool.” Journal of Animal Science
85:2639–59.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
Moschini, G., and K.D. Meilke. 1989. “Modeling the
Pattern of Structural Change in U.S. Meat De-
mand.” American Journal of Agricultural Eco-
nomics 71:253–61.
Padel, S., and C. Foster. 2005. “Exploring the
Gap between Attitudes and Behaviour: Under-
standing Why Consumers Buy or Do Not Buy
Organic Food.” British Food Journal 107:606–
25.
Reynolds, T.J., and J. Gutman. 1988. “Ladder-
ing Theory, Method, Analysis and Interpreta-
tion.” Journal of Advertising Research 28:11–
31.
Rokeach, M. 1973. The Nature of Human Values.
Downloaded from http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Western Ontario on May 28, 2014
New York: Free Press.
Sawtooth Software. 2007. “The MaxDiff/Web Sys-
tem Technical Paper.” Available at: http://www.
sawtoothsoftware.com/download/techpap/max
difftech.pdf
Schwartz, S.H. 1992. “Universals in the Content
and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances
and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries.” Ad-
vances in Experimental Social Psychology 25:1–
65.
Shogren, J.F., J.A. List, and D.J. Hayes. 2000. “Pref-
erence Learning in Consecutive Experimental
Auctions.” American Journal of Agricultural
Economics 82:1016–21.
Steenkamp, J.-B.E.M., and H. Baumgartner. 1998.
“Assessing Measurement Invariance in Cross-
National Consumer Research.” Journal of
Consumer Research 25:78–90.
Thurstone, L.L. 1927. “A Law of Comparative Judg-
ment.” Psychological Review 34:273–86.
——. 1983. “Non-Parametric Tests of Consumer Be-
haviour.” Review of Economic Studies 50:99–
110.
Train, K.E. 2003. Discrete Choice Methods with Sim-
ulation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Varian, H.R. 1982. “The Nonparametric Approach
to Demand Analysis.” Econometrica 50:945–
73.