Experimental Economics
Lab Research

Measuring Consumer’s Willingness to Pay for Differently Labeled and Sourced Sweet Potatoes

As part of our extension outreach, we have partnered with “Sweet Grown Alabama”, one of our experiments is aimed at measuring consumer’s willingness to pay for differently labeled and sourced sweet potatoes. We are completing this project with a team of faculty and students from Auburn University’s College of Agriculture and the Economics Research Lab.

We partnered with Sweet Grown Alabama to help us source our sweet potatoes, and the Economic Research Lab to help with our participant outreach. The Economic Research Lab successfully formed relationships with participants to gather enough data to conduct the experiment. Overall, the experiment was a success, and everyone was impacted positively by this experience.

Social Comparison and Risk-Taking in Agricultural Production

Although many studies have investigated various factors that affect the choice of different risk levels in agricultural production, little attention has been paid to social learning and socio-economic status. The highly interconnected nature of rural communities may intensify social comparisons and can pronounce the trying-to-keep-with-the-winners effect. Therefore, this study causally investigates the role of social ranking in farmers’ risk-taking behavior. We designed an incentivized experiment with four different asset types (Assets A, B, C, and D) in which asset risk and yield levels monotonically increase. We conduct online and lab experiments with Upward Comparison (UC) and Downward Comparison (DC) treatments and No Comparison (NC) baseline to scrutinize the impact of social ranking on risky asset choices. Moreover, we use the eye-tracking machine to record participants’ emotions and attention changes during the experiment, which will help us to explore the underlying mechanism of how social comparison changes risk-taking behavior.

Specialized Equipment

Currently we have 16 state of the art Microsoft Surface Laptops that allow us to collect data remotely in the field. We also have a Tobii Eye-Tracker sensor.