Abstract

In this paper, we study the factors that influence consumer attitudes toward aquaculture as well as annual expenditure on aquaculture products. Our analysis is composed of two parts. First, we estimate the effects of several covariates of interest on annual seafood expenditure using a two-way censored regression model, due to the nature of the survey data. Our results indicate that consumers who are college-educated, aware of aquaculture operations in their area, and more aware about where their seafood is produced tend to spend more on farm-raised seafood. Second, attitude indices are used as dependent variables in three distinct logit regressions, one for each of the respective seafood categories, i.e., finfish, shellfish, and sea vegetables. For both the finfish and shellfish regressions, the results suggest that being older, being more informed about East Coast aquaculture operations, desiring at least state-level detail for production location, and looking closely at seafood labels more frequently were all associated with a lower probability of having a negative attitude toward aquaculture. Few explanatory variables had statistically significant effects in the sea vegetable regression, which is likely due to the low number of respondents in our sample aware of sea vegetable aquaculture operations (approximately 23%).

摘要

在本文中，我们研究了影响消费者对水产养殖态度的因素以及水产养殖产品的年度支出。我们的分析由两部分组成。首先，由于调查数据的性质，我们使用双向删失回归模型估计了几个感兴趣的协变量对年度海鲜支出的影响。我们的结果表明，受过大学教育、了解其所在地区的水产养殖业务以及更了解其海鲜产地的消费者倾向于在农场养殖的海鲜上花费更多。其次，态度指数在三个不同的 logit 回归中被用作因变量，一个用于各自的海鲜类别，即有鳍鱼、贝类和海菜。对于有鳍鱼类和贝类回归，结果表明年龄越大，更多地了解东海岸水产养殖业务、至少希望了解生产地点的州级细节以及更频繁地仔细查看海产品标签，都与对水产养殖持负面态度的可能性较低有关。很少有解释变量对海菜回归具有统计上的显着影响，这可能是由于我们样本中了解海菜水产养殖作业的受访者人数较少（约 23%）。