Valuing an EU Animal Welfare Label using Experimental Auctions

摘要

The aim of this article is to determine consumers’ valuation for an EU Animal Welfare (EU-CAW) Label for products providing higher animal welfare standards than the current legal requirements. Using revealed preference data from random nth price auction mechanism and two auction procedures, our results generally suggest that consumers are willing to pay a premium for an EU Animal Welfare (EU-CAW) Label for cured ham. This finding is consistent in both the endowment and full-bidding auction approaches we employed in our experiments conducted in Spain. The average premium that consumers are willing to pay for a cured ham with the EU-CAW Label ranges between 19% and 23% of the average price of the regular cured ham that is currently available in supermarkets.