Eliciting Consumer WTP for Food Characteristics in a Developing Context: Application of Four Valuation Methods in an African Market

We elicit willingness to pay for conventional, organic and/or food-safety-inspected tomatoes in a traditional African food market. We identify four elicitation methods that can be conducted with one respondent at a time, and use them in a field setting: the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism, multiple price lists, multiple price lists with stated quantities, and real-choice experiments. All four methods give similar results; showing that consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic and food-safety-inspected tomatoes. However, the size of the premium is significantly larger when consumers choose between alternatives than when they indicate their reservation price. The new multiple price lists with stated quantities were easy to explain in the busy market setting, gave the respondents the opportunity to determine the amount they wanted to buy, and had valuations in line with the other non-comparative valuation methods.