Volume 13, Issue 1 - Special Issue: The Behavioral and Neuroeconomics of Food and Brand Decisions

This executive summary provides the rationale for and summary of the articles of this Special Edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization.

Cognitive neuroscience methods have recently been employed to examine the neural underpinnings of food-related decision-making. The emerging field of food decision neuroscience uses cognitive neuroscience tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how individuals make decisions regarding food intake, purchasing, branding, and advertising. These tools can be employed to inform marketing strategies, advertising, and product differentiation. Results can also be leveraged to aid in the design of food labeling and policy for obesity, advertising to children, and others. While these tools have the promise for advancing agricultural science as well as informing food related policy, there are some potential pitfalls when applying these techniques to new fields. The goal of this paper is to outline some of the major tools used by cognitive neuroscience – beginning with experimental design and behavioral measures, and then followed by a discussion of some of the neuroimaging tools (fMRI, electroencephalography and event-related potentials [EEG/ERP], and magnetoencephalography [MEG]) – and to highlight how those tools have been used to understand food decision-making.

Food decisions occur very frequently and are influenced by a variety of individual as well as contextual factors. Physical product attributes, including for example, caloric density, water content and sweetness are important drivers of food choice and preferences. However, food products are usually not evaluated solely based on their nutritional content. In addition, most products are packaged and carry abstract attributes, such as quality claims, and brand names. Critically, these product attributes, not products attributes also influence food consumption, reported consumption enjoyment, and product demand. A variety of these marketing actions were shown to alter consumption experiences of otherwise identical products, inducing a so-called marketing placebo effect (MPE). Here, we review studies providing insights into the various behavioral and neural processes underlying the response to these contextual marketing cues. An extensive amount of studies has shown impressive, sometimes peculiar and also disquieting effects of branding, logos, labels and prices on behavioral measures. We will illustrate the plethora of affected behaviors, ranging from increased taste pleasantness ratings for higher-priced wines to enhanced cognitive performance after drinking a higher-priced energy drink, compared to the identical lower-priced counterparts. Credence attributes, such as organic or social sustainability labels, have been gaining relevance in many industrialized countries, and influence product demand and consumption experience. We will therefore introduce studies that systematically investigated the effects of credence claims, elucidate possible mechanisms, and emphasize the negative consequences when misusing such claims. As children are an important and vulnerable target group for marketing actions, we will also specifically present studies conducted in children. These studies highlight the influence of marketing actions on children’s taste perception, product demand, and effort to obtain a certain product. We will shortly introduce the neurobiology of food choices, and present suggested processes underlying MPEs. Converging evidence confirms that MPEs are not a mere result of demand effects, but that they influence the neural responses to products down to a primary somatosensory level. We will show that marketing claims are very effective in influencing expectations and subsequent consumption experience. Therefore, we suggest that public policy interventions may build upon MPE research, and we will provide evidence for this supposition. Throughout this review, we present insights from a variety of different disciplines, including marketing, psychology, neuroscience and nutrition science. Albeit far from exhaustive, this non-systematic review aims at providing a joint perspective from various fields, highlighting that future research endeavor is certainly auspicious.

Though the number of choices that individuals routinely must make has proliferated, comparatively little attention has been paid in the economics literature to consumer – compared to expert – knowledge, and its role in facilitating valuation and affecting choice outcomes. In this article, I review relevant work in economics, and then focus on research on knowledge that has used wine as the object of interest. Psychologists and sensory scientists have studied the role of wine expertise in sensory perception and categorization, and I review this literature to suggest how knowledge might also affect valuation and choice in the wine market. I finish by describing three recent studies on the role of knowledge in consumer valuation, information use, and choice outcomes in the American wine market. All three studies provide strong evidence that consumer knowledge is an important variable to consider in markets for differentiated products. Knowledge allows people to make greater use of objective label information when valuing wine in an experimental auction context, with high knowledge participants updating their bids more after participants received new information. In a field experiment, we find that high knowledge consumers derive greater value when selecting wines from a substantial inventory than do low knowledge consumers.

Background : Several studies have explored factors influencing consumer choice of foods and non-alcoholic beverages (hereafter, foods), and brand information has been shown to affect potential determinants of eating behaviour, such as consumer attitudes. However, experimental studies have yet to fully elucidate the impact of brand information (presence versus absence of brand imagery) on actual behaviour, in terms of acute food-related decision making. This study aimed to review recent developments and identify key methodological considerations and future directions for this field. Methods : This was a systematic review of recent experimental studies in which actual foods were presented to participants, with brand information manipulated at the point of taking an acute outcome measure of preference, choice or intake. Three electronic databases were searched for relevant publications (Web of Science, PubMed and PsycINFO). In order to capture recent research developments, searches were limited to English language papers published in the last five years (2010–) and electronic searches were supplemented by a manual search of reference sections in eligible papers. Results : Ten papers were eligible for inclusion in this review, reporting on eleven experiments. Overall, the results did not show conclusively whether or not brand information affects acute food-related decision making, although effects on food intake were more consistent than effects on preference and choice. Where an impact of brand information was found, it appeared to be moderated by individual differences, specifically weight status, gender and psychological profile (particularly restraint). Conclusion : This study highlighted the small number of relevant recent studies on this topic, and the substantial heterogeneity in design that exists across this literature. There is a clear need for more high quality, methodologically consistent research of branding effects on immediate food-related decisions. Consistent outcome reporting (such as demarcation of reporting across pertinent participant sub-groups) should also be encouraged to enable accurate comparisons and allow reliable conclusions to be drawn.

Peoples’ choices are not instantaneous, nor are they perfectly self consistent. While these two facts may at first seem unrelated, they are in fact inextricably linked. Decision scientists are accustomed to using logit and probit models to account for “noise” in their choice data. But what is the driving force behind these behavioral inconsistencies? Random utility theory (RUT) provides little guidance in this respect. While providing a mathematical basis for dealing with stochastic choice, RUT is agnostic about whether the noise is due to unobserved characteristics of the decision maker and/or the choice environment, or due to actual “mistakes.” The distinction is important because the former implies that from the point of view of the decision maker, her choices are perfectly consistent, while the latter implies that the decision maker herself may be surprised by her set of choices. Here we argue that non-choice (“process”) data strongly favors the latter explanation. Rather than thinking of choice as an instantaneous realization of stored preferences, we instead conceptualize choice as a dynamical process of information accumulation and comparison. Adapting “sequential sampling models” from cognitive psychology to economic choice, we illustrate the surprisingly complex relationship between choice and response-time data. Finally, we review recent data demonstrating how other process measures such as eye-tracking and neural recordings can be incorporated into this modeling approach, yielding further insights into the choice process.

Food decisions receive a lot of attention from multiple disciplines. In this context, choice experiments are often used to determine consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay for food product attributes. The design of choice experiments and its influence on measurement of consumer choices has received great consideration. This study analyzes the influence of visual attention on the final choice by combining choice experiments with eye tracking. Furthermore, the role of attention on more or less complex choices is investigated by using two treatments with three-attribute and five-attribute designs. We find that visual attention affects decision making of the average individual but there is heterogeneity in behavior present as to how much attention influences choice. Furthermore, results show that visual attention predicts choice more in the choice experiment with the three-attribute design than in the choice experiment with the five-attribute design.

Evolution provided us with the important feature of affective information processing, which is designed to detect potentially harmful and appetitive sources in a dynamic environment. Transferred into the modern world of consumption research, we are interested in studying this particular approach versus avoidance behavior. We call it affective information processing which is the underlying basis of all emotions and a significant part of attitudes relevant to consumption. This paper provides conceptual and measurement-related reflections on our understanding of attitudes and emotions relevant to consumption.

Impulsive choice behavior occurs when individuals make choices without regard for future consequences. This behavior is often maladaptive and is a common symptom in many disorders, including drug abuse, compulsive gambling, and obesity. Several proposed mechanisms may influence impulsive choice behavior. These mechanisms provide a variety of pathways that may provide the basis for individual differences that are often evident when measuring choice behavior. This review provides an overview of these different pathways to impulsive choice, and the behavioral intervention strategies being developed to moderate impulsive choice. Because of the compelling link between impulsive choice behavior and the near-epidemic pervasiveness of obesity in the United States, we focus on the relationship between impulsive choice behavior and obesity as a test case for application of the multiple pathways approach. Choosing immediate gratification over healthier long term food choices is a contributing factor to the obesity crisis. Behavioral interventions can lead to more self-controlled choices in a rat pre-clinical model, suggesting a possible gateway for translation to human populations. Designing and implementing effective impulsive choice interventions is crucial to improving the overall health and well-being of impulsive individuals.

Delay discounting describes how the subjective value of a given commodity decreases as the delay to receiving that commodity increases. Decades of behavioral economic research have found that individuals suffering from a range of clinical conditions (e.g., drug addiction, obesity) tend to devalue delayed rewards more quickly than individuals without said clinical conditions and that such individuals tend to discount subjectively equivalent amounts of their disorder-related commodity (e.g., cocaine for a cocaine dependent individual) more rapidly than money. Rates of discounting in regular caffeine users versus occasional caffeine users remain unknown, as does the rate at which individuals discount delayed caffeinated beverages. The present study used a novel discounting questionnaire to examine discounting of caffeinated beverages and money in daily and occasional caffeine users. As with other commodities, caffeinated beverages were discounted at higher rates than money, but this elevated rate of caffeine discounting was only seen in occasional users. Unlike users of other psychostimulants, daily caffeine users did not discount more rapidly than controls. These findings are discussed in light on the existing body of evidence on delay discounting.

In 2008, California passed Proposition 2, specifying confinement space for certain farm animals. Proposition 2 went into full effect January 2015 and has significant implications for egg production in California and possibly even interstate commerce. We examined the influence of promotional videos aired during the campaign on consumers’ willingness-to-pay for eggs produced in a more open production system (i.e., cage-free, free range) and corresponding neurofunctional activations during decisions. Forty-six participants (24 females), aged 18–55 years ( M =29.65), were enrolled and performed a food decision-making task during fMRI scanning. In each decision, two options of identical one dozen cartons of eggs were presented simultaneously. Below each option were two attributes, describing price and production method. Cage free and free-range eggs were more expensive, at varying degrees. Participants were randomized to one of three 30-second video groups: pro-Proposition 2, anti-Proposition 2, and a Neutral flowing stream. Based on a whole brain analysis, participants in the pro-Proposition 2 video group ( N =16) demonstrated significantly greater activations post-video compared to pre-video in left insular cortex and right occipital cortex. This change in insula activity may be indicative of increased social risk involved with the purchase of closed production method eggs, driving participants to increase their percentage of decisions to purchase the higher priced, open-method eggs. It is possible that the insula activation indicates that consumers are constrained to choosing the eggs produced under open-cage production methods, after viewing advertisements advocating for Proposition 2.