Retailer decisions about organic imports and organic private labels.

摘要

Relying on a recent survey of US food retailers' organic procurement and marketing practices, this paper attempts to bring some insight to the relationship between organic imports and organic private labels (PLs). To do so, it specifically investigates three related research questions: First, does a strong organic PL retailing presence lead to more organic imports? Second, and conversely, do higher levels of organic imports lead to more organic PLs? And finally, are the organic PL and organic import decisions made jointly? The results support affirmative answers to the first two questions but are inconclusive regarding the third. After accounting for endogeneity, two separate univariate tobit estimation results show that higher shares of organic PLs lead to higher shares of imported organic products, and vice versa. However, a bivariate tobit model useful for testing simultaneity in decision making fails to converge.