Consumers preferences for bio-based products and market analysis

Many consumers seek food safety and are willing to pay higher prices for "healthy or nutritive products" since they increase their utility level, reducing, at the same time, health risks. However, they are unable to ascertain food safety before purchase, being this the most important constraint to economic efficiency in the production and marketing of food safety. Most food markets do not count on complete information about food quality for consumers. As a consequence, quality has become a crucial concept in the new approaches of the Demand Theory (Lancaster, 1966); and so, Antle (1999) started to incorporate it in food demand functions as an additional variable. Quality is a wide and subjective notion that refers to different kinds of attributes that could either be verified by consumers or not, before or after purchasing food, e.g. colour, temperature, taste, nutritious facts, applied processes -such as irradiation or genetic manipulation- and added substances during the productive processes. Quality uncertainty has played a key role in the literature about safety and products liability and several articles have dealt with quality and uncertainty, the most relevant of which is that by Akerlof (1970), which demonstrates that when purchasing food, consumers make their choices by comparing prices and qualities. Such choices are definitely conditioned by the uncertainty they perceive in relation to the different qualities offered by the markets and by the information available to them. The purpose of this socio-economic research is to contribute to the development of bio-based products markets at international and domestic level and to improve the information looking forward 1. Mobilizing policy and institutional changes aimed at promoting and facilitating public and private decision-making, 2. Evaluation of specific resource alternatives/tecnologies/regulation to the especific bioeconomic product and market development.