A relative increase in demand for one type of beef can have one of two potentially countervailing effects: it can cause substitution of one type for another and/or it might expand overall demand. The results of a random parameters logit analysis indicate that regardless of whether USDA Choice or...

This article highlights some key areas where economics can contribute to the current debate about animal welfare. Production economics reveals that producers will not maximize animal welfare, even if animal well-being is highly correlated with output. Welfare economics raises thorny issues about...

Both bodies of the U.S. Congress have recently considered legislation to restrict use of antibiotics in livestock feed. Although several studies have addressed the costs of such restrictions, little is known about consumer demand. This study estimates consumers' willingness to pay for pork...

In this article, we investigate the effect of several commonly used experimental designs on willingness-to-pay in a Monte Carlo environment where true utility parameters are known. All experimental designs considered in this study generated unbiased valuation estimates. However, random designs...

There has been considerable debate regarding which probability distribution best represents crop yields. This study ranks six yield densities based on their out-of-sample forecasting performance. The forecasting ability for each density was ranked according to its likelihood function value when...

Recent marketing and psychological studies have shown that more choice does not always benefit consumers. This excessive-choice effect (ECE) is examined empirically using food items in four experiments. The first experiment investigates whether people would voluntarily reduce their choice-set...

We compare the ability of three preference elicitation methods (hypothetical choices, nonhypothetical choices, and nonhypothetical rankings) and three discrete-choice econometric models (the multinomial logit [MNL], the independent availability logit [IAL], and the random parameter logit [RPL])...

Six popular crop yield distributions are compared to determine which best describes yield fluctuations out-of-sample. For 183 crop and county combinations, each distribution is estimated and ranked according to its log-likelihood function observed at out-of-sample observations. A semiparametric...