"Consumers are shaping the food and agricultural system, thus a better understanding of their food preferences and purchasing behavior is needed in order to provide decision supports for agricultural producers and agribusinesses. Experimental methods provide an alternative to investigate consumer preference and demand for innovative food products, allowing for explicitly modelling the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that influences individual decision-making. This dissertation leverages discrete choice experiments to better understand the consumer food decision-making process and also informs methodological issues associated with stated preference methods. The first essay assesses the effects of three ex-ante hypothetical bias mitigation methods on Chinese consumer's stated online food shopping behavior: a cheap talk script, the solemn oath and honesty priming. Using data from choice experiments, my analysis finds no significant differences in willingness to pay (WTP) values for all product attributes between the various mitigation methods and a control group, implying that hypothetical bias is not likely a significant concern when using internet-based choice experiments to elicit marginal WTP values for online food product characteristics. I discuss how e-commerce can better address consumer needs and explain the importance of my findings for study design and future research on consumer online food shopping behavior.Acceptance of food products from these animals is expected to be controversial and requires a thorough understanding of consumer preferences. The second essay explores the role of personality, measured via the Big Six personality traits, on consumer acceptance of a genetically modified pork product in the US, China and Italy. I find that the effect of personality is most evident in US consumers with five out of six personality traits explaining preferences for genetically modified pork. Openness is the only trait that consistently explains consumer acceptance in the three countries, and conscientiousness is found to be a good predictor in Western cultures. This result reinforces the importance of capturing psychological characteristics of consumers to understand controversial food acceptance and highlights the differential impact of personality across cultures.Food valuation studies have employed a wide range of product quantities in designing their experiments, assuming that individual preferences are constant, not affected by the framing effect of product quantity. However, this assumption may not hold from the perspective of mental budgeting. The third essay investigates whether and why experimental quantities employed by food valuation studies affect consumer food choice behaviors. Two DCE designs are evaluated: one being the traditional design with 500 grams; the other allowing the unit to be matched with respondent's self-reported quantity per purchase. I find that in the traditional design, consumers' price sensitivities and the probability to opt-out from making a purchase decrease as their actual purchase quantities (and default budgets) increase. These discrepancies in choice behavior are mitigated in the matched design. As most respondents purchase more than 500 grams in real life, the marginal WTPs for most product attributes are biased upward in the traditional design. I also propose a novel design that provides more relevant preference estimates and could be incorporated in the various experimental settings."--Pages ii-iii.
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