Swedish Consumer Preferences for Animal Welfare and Biotech: A Choice Experiment

Abstract

This paper compares consumer preferences for immunocastration versus surgical castration and no castration using willingness- to-pay estimates from a choice experiment. Results suggest that consumers place a higher value on pork from immunocastrated pigs than pork from surgically castrated pigs. In contrast, consumers reveal negative valuations of pork from intact boars as compared to pork from surgical castrates. We also show how a binary heteroskedastic logit model can be used to accommodate a larger variance for later choice sets within a choice experiment.