Книги

We analyse the competition in quality and quantity between a foreign firm and a domestic firm. The domestic firm can belong to a certification of origin, whereas its rival uses a pure brand strategy. We will show how the certification can allow the domestic firm to position itself as a high quality producer and improve the average quality of the products offered on the market. If, however, the certified firm offers the low quality good, the certification can permit it to guarantee a higher profit than that of its competitor and to improve the consumers’ surplus by favoring product standardisation.

The paper analyzes some empirical aspects of competition in the Russian food market. The forms of competition in the economy under transition are discussed and empirical studies summarize the results of a survey carried out on the Russian food industry covering 61 firms. The survey focused on current marketing strategies and marketing problems of Russian food companies and their assessment concerning the nature of competition and its effects on the economic environment. The survey also addressed the issue of how government activities impact the competitive environment for agro-food firms. Some changes in the situation of agro-food industries after the financial crisis in August 1998 are also examined.

Recent food scares in the food market has caused a reduction in consumer’s confidence in the food system that it has induced a significant reduction in consumption in a sector, the beef sector that was already characterized by a saturated trend in quantity terms. In this context, all participants in the beef production system are facing to a greatchallenge, to retrieve consumer’s confidence in the food chain and to mitigate the reduction in beef consumption. The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of consumer’s confidence in the food system as well as other factors on the explanation of food consumption reduction. A structural modelling approach has been used to analyse factors affecting the reduction in beef consumption in two different regions characterised by different production systems and different marketing strategies (PGI beef label). Results indicate that main factor explaining the reduction in beef consumption is the confidence in the beef and a positive relation has been found. Moreover, confidence in a product is directly related to the perceived quality offered by farmers and other decision makers on the beef chain, and to the consumer involvement with the product. Therefore, the main implication is that participants in the food chain has to develop adequate communication strategies such as quality labelling in order to increase consumers perceive quality because, higher quality perception will recover consumers’ confidence in beef, and therefore, it will mitigate beef consumption reduction.

The present study attempts to offer more insights into the Greek wine market with emphasis on wines produced from organically grown grapes by relating wine choice to consumers’ personal value structure. With the use of a qualitative sample and applying the Means-end Chains methodology and the corresponding “laddering” interviewing technique, it attempts first to reveal the way basic motives are linked to wine shopping behaviour of consumers and the way wine purchase-relevant knowledge is stored and organised in their memory in relation to their personal values. Then, by discriminating between organic food buyers and non-buyers, the study identifies motivational and cognitive discriminating differences between the two consumer types, which can offer a solid explanation as to their distinctive purchasing behaviour in respect of the organic products.

The paper develops a measure of consumer welfare losses associated with withheld information about BSE linkage with vCJD. food safety. The Cost of Ignorance (COI) is measured by comparing the utility of the informed choice with the utility of the uninformed one, under condition of improved information. Unlike previous work, based on a single equation demand model, the measure is obtained retrieving a cost function from a dynamic Almost Ideal Demand System. The results indicate that Italian consumers bore a significant loss because of the delayed release of information.