Consumer’s choices and a willingness to pay for Auvergne cheese under PDO label. An empirical analysis.
Résumé
This paper aims to estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) of French consumers for the 5 Auvergne PDO cheeses, namely “Cantal”, “Saint Nectaire”, “Bleu d'Auvergne”, “Fourme d'Ambert” and “Salers”. To do this, Firstly, we compare the consumers’ choice for the Auvergne’s cheeses with PDO label between them with a mixed logit model (MXL). Secondly and based on this estimates, we deduce the WTP of consumers for the attributes of each product. Finally, we add in our sample the PDO cheeses from other regions like “Roquefort" and “Comté”, and the no-PDO cheeses like “Camembert”, “Coulommier” and “Other blue cheese”, this allows us to compare the consumer’s choice for the Auvergne PDO cheeses with other French PDO and no-PDO cheeses from others region. As main results, we found that the attributes of product influence more the purchases of the products compared to the individual characteristics of consumers. Moreover, among the Auvergne PDO cheeses, consumer’s willing to pay on average +1.794 €/kg and +2.3 €/kg for PDO “Cantal” and PDO “Bleu Auvergne” respectively. While, they willing to pay on average -5.208 €/kg, -0.489 €/kg and -6.406 €/kg for the PDO “St Nectaire”, the PDO “Fourme Ambert” and the PDO “Salers” respectively. We also found that the Auvergne PDO cheeses are better sold in their region of origin than the no-PDO and the PDO cheeses from other regions, which reflects an ethnocentrism of consumers in this region. Finally, the calculation of utilities shows that consumers prefer in first choice the no-PDO cheeses, then the PDO cheeses from other regions, and finally the Auvergne PDO cheeses. We conclude that the Auvergne PDO cheeses and the PDO cheeses from other regions should review their marketing strategy in order to better compete with no-PDO cheeses. The major contribution of this paper is to be the first empirical paper to assess the determinants of choice and a WTP of consumers for the 5 Auvergne PDO cheeses with original data from Kantar WorldPanel.