Willingness to Pay for Irradiated Food: A Non Hypothetical Market Experiment

This paper focuses on estimating consumers' willingness to pay for and willingness to accept irradiated food using a non-hypothetical experiment utilizing real food products (i.e., irradiated ground beef), real cash, and actual exchange in a market setting. Single-bounded and one and one-half bounded models are developed using dichotomous choice contingent valuation experiments. Our results indicate that average willingness to pay values range from 75.43 to 78.51 cents per pound while average willingness to accept values range from 69.49 to 81.63 cents per pound of irradiated ground beef.