Vietnamese consumer behavior and willingness to pay for safe vegetables in the presence of information asymmetry - A study for Hanoi

Abstract

The paper studies the consumer behavior in the Vietnamese market of safe vegetables, focusing on Hanoi City. The questions of interest are: What criteria can consumers use to assess the safety of vegetables? and What are the determinants of their willingness to pay (WTP) if the vegetable is truly safe? Statistical methods as well as interval regression models were used in the analysis on the surveyed data. The results showed that consumers based mainly on intuitive factors such as “store’s reputation” or “labelling” to assess the vegetable’s safety, while the formal factor as “government certificate” played a small role. Furthermore, the WTP depended strongly on “the worry about safety” and “income”, while education background and gender were not important.