Consumer Preferences for Rice Produced with Consideration for Biodiversity
摘要
There are initiatives to produce rice while protecting the creatures living in the paddy fields, in addition to reducing pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In this chapter, I introduce people's preferences for such rice products, with specific focus on whether people have different willingness to pay depending on the species to be conserved, and whether they have a higher willingness to pay for endangered species. For the analysis, I applied a method called Best–Worst Scaling and employed a latent class model that can analyze the diversity of respondents’ preferences. The results revealed that respondents could pay more for birds and fish and less for amphibians, compared to insects, and could have higher willingness to pay for endangered species. Yet, there is variation in the degree to which they consider each of these desirable, and there are a certain number of respondents who are not very interested in these issues or do not consider them desirable.