Food choices are key in communicating religious identities and marking religious boundaries. Whereas the literature has focused on religion's impact on food habits, the effect of religion on food market exchanges remains largely unexplored. Using the Ethiopian milk market as a case study, we conduct a series of innovative experimental choice tasks with urban dairy consumers to elicit their preferences for milk seller characteristics. In the choice tasks, milk seller profiles are constructed using five relevant attributes: milk price, distance to the selling point, seller type, seller gender, and seller religious affiliation. We observe consumer preferences for lower milk prices, shorter distances, and dairy farmers over milk shops. When accounting for attribute non-attendance, we find that consumers who take religion into account prefer co-religious sellers, and that consumers who take gender into account generally prefer female sellers. Our results enrich our understanding of the role of religion in purchase behavior and market segmentation.

中文翻译：

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揭示食品交易中宗教联系的偏好：消费者视角

食物选择是传达宗教身份和标记宗教界限的关键。尽管文献集中于宗教对饮食习惯的影响，但宗教对食品市场交易的影响在很大程度上仍未得到探索。以埃塞俄比亚牛奶市场为案例研究，我们与城市乳制品消费者进行了一系列创新的实验选择任务，以激发他们对牛奶销售商特征的偏好。在选择任务中，牛奶卖家档案使用五个相关属性构建：牛奶价格、到卖点的距离、卖家类型、卖家性别和卖家宗教信仰。我们观察到消费者偏好较低的牛奶价格、较短的距离以及奶农对奶店的偏好。在考虑属性缺勤时，我们发现考虑宗教的消费者更喜欢同宗教的卖家，而考虑性别的消费者通常更喜欢女性卖家。我们的结果丰富了我们对宗教在购买行为和市场细分中的作用的理解。