Apparently McDonald's is the most bi-partisan restaurant chain and Coca-Cola is the most bi-partisan food brand.
Which do you think are the most left- and right- leaning?
Check out the following charts from this web page
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Neuroeconomics of Food Choice
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece last week on the need for more neuroeconomic research.
While I am a bit unsure of where the field is heading (and in some cases it is over-hyped), I do think there are fascinating things to be learned. That's one of the reasons why I'm involved in a project with researchers at KSU, UMKC, and KU-med, where we are studying how people make choices between foods produced with controversial technologies while observing their brain responses via fMRI. The ability of plant and food scientists to innovate depends on people's acceptance of technologies, and I'm hopeful that we can provide insight into this matter.
Right now we have 50 observations collected (which is actually quite a large sample size for an fMRI study), and we are in the process of writing up several papers. So stay tuned for our findings.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with the optimistic closing sentences from the Chronicle article related to whether economist shoulds be spending their time on neuro-imaging:
The only way to find out, he says, is to do it. And if it works, if a model of a mental process improves an economist's ability to predict what people will do, "then I think neuroeconomics could be very big."
Can Labeling Actually Harm Consumers?
That was the question asked in a recent study Stephan Marette and I just published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization. The answer is "maybe."
Traditional economic models assume that more information (as long as it is accurate) can only help consumers (so long as the cost of providing the information isn't higher than the benefit). After all, if a consumer doesn't find the information useful, it can simply be ignored.
But, this model assumes consumers are perfectly informed about all controversial issues they confront and that they can fully pay attention to all these competing issues.
What we show in our paper is that when consumers' attentions are limited (as they almost certainly are), that providing information (even if it is accurate) can - in some cases - actually make the consumer worse off. How? Because more information about one topic (like whether foods are made with genetically engineered ingredients) might distract consumers from paying attention from other important topics (like the number of carbs in the food) which has a bigger impact on long-term health.
Here is the paper abstract:
Information and labeling are popular food policy instruments because of their presumed positive influence on consumer welfare. In a one-good case with unlimited attention, we show consumer welfare is always improved with the provision of accurate information. However, in a two-good case with limited attention, we show that consumer welfare is not always improved with the provision of accurate information. When attention is constrained, welfare may fall with information provision policies irrespective of their costs. The results suggest information and labeling polices may sometimes be counterproductive when attention is limited.
Don't Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good
That's how I'd sum up Matt Ridley's excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal. He starts by arguing that:
Generally, technologies are judged on their net benefits, not on the claim that they are harmless: The good effects of, say, the automobile and aspirin outweigh their dangers. Today, arguably, adopting certain new technologies is harder not just because of a policy of precaution but because of a bias in much of the media against reporting the benefits.
He rightly argues that negative articles on topics like biotechnology and shale gas make catchier headlines and drown out all the positive information. Case in point?
A recent French study claimed that both pesticides and GM corn fed to cancer-susceptible strains of rats produced an increase in tumors. The study has come in for withering criticism from mainstream scientists for its opaque data, small samples, unsatisfactory experimental design and unconventional statistical analysis, yet it has still gained headlines world-wide. (In published responses, the authors have stood by their results.)
The French study contradicts a Japanese paper that used larger samples, longer trials and accepted experimental designs, yet received virtually no notice because it found no increase in cancer in rats fed on GM crops. This is a problem that’s bedeviled GM technology from the start: Studies that find harm are shouted from the media rooftops, those that do not are ignored.
He goes on to document the potential environmental benefits from GMOs.
While no one would argue we should ignore the potential dangers of new technologies (particularly biotechnologies), it would be equally crazy to ignore their potential benefits.
Gestation Crates and Unfunded Mandates
The New York Times had a nice piece on the challenges faced by hog farmers converting from gestation crate systems to open pen systems. For background, the Human Society of the United States (HSUS) has won successful ballot initiatives in states such as California, Florida, and elsewhere banning gestation crates, and in recent months several large restaurant chains have said they will (at some future date) no longer source pork from farms that use gestation crates.
I strongly disagree with the farmer in the piece who says,
What I don’t like is some big restaurant chain in Chicago that knows nothing about raising animals is telling us how to raise pigs.
It is the consumer, after all, who wins the day. Nobody who makes a living selling what they produce to others has the final say so (at least as long as they want to stay in business).
Despite that quibble, the article does a nice job characterizing the trade-offs entailed in phasing out gestation crates and documenting the reasons why farmers adopted these systems in the first place (something we also tried to do in our book on the subject).
The end of the piece has a quote from my friend and collaborator, Glynn Tonsor at Kansas State University, who gets at the crux of the problem faced by many pork and egg producers. The issue is that when consumers show up in the voting booth, they enthusiastically vote to ban practices such as gestation crates in pork production and battery cages in egg production. Yet, when those same people visit the grocery store, they aren't willing to pay the extra amount for meat and eggs produced in alternative systems.
In essence, we have consumers requiring farmers to adopt practices, which the consumers (according to their own behavior) aren't fully willing to pay for. Farmers, then, face something very much like an unfunded mandate (a phrase I believe I heard Glynn first use in this context). Unfunded mandates normally come about when the government requires the adoption of a costly practice or service without providing the funding to accomplish the outcome. In a similar manner, consumers and restaurant chains are requiring farmers to adopt practices without being willing to pay for what they say they want.
The ultimate result will be lower profits for hog farmers (well, at least US hog farmers). It should be noted that hog farmers are already predicted to suffer record losses over the next year because of rising feed costs.
While we may have to live with a less profitable hog sector, I at least implore voters to count the costs in the voting booth in the same way they do in the grocery store. Some hog farmers, who have transitioned away from gestation crates, have found niche markets of consumers who are willing to pay the higher prices. Here's hoping the niche grows mainstream so that funding will follow the mandate.