Simulation of Market Demand for Traceable Pork with Different Levels of Safety Information: A Case Study in Chinese Consumers

The Chinese government has always promoted the pork traceability system; however, expensive traceable pork of limited variety containing single-level safety information cannot meet the differentiated consumer demand of the Chinese market. A survey was conducted of 2,080 consumers in five cities distributed in east, south, southwest, northeast, and central China, in which traceable pork hindquarter profiles were constructed by combining traceable safety information attributes with government certification, appearance, and price. Individual consumers' part-worth utilities were estimated using a choice experiment and hierarchical Bayesian inference. On this basis, combined with ordinary pork hindquarter profiles in the real market, different traceable pork hindquarter profiles were set to develop seven market schemes. Furthermore, market shares of each scheme were simulated using the random first choice method. Most consumers chose appearance rather than safety in the choice experiment, which also indicated that traceable safety information certified by the government had a higher part-worth utility. Simulation results suggested that a larger market share could be better achieved by supplying multilevel traceable pork hindquarters in the market at the same time, rather than by supplying single-level traceable pork hindquarters. Moreover, income was found to be the key factor in determining consumers' demand.