The role of participants’ competitiveness in consumers’ valuation for food products using experimental auctions

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to assess the effect of the participants’ competitiveness on their valuation for food products. Specifically, to investigate the effect of the participants’ competitiveness on their bids in a non-hypothetical experimental auction. Then, we designed an experimental auction to measure the consumers’ preferences for food products with two treatments. Both treatments had all the same designed characteristics except that in the second treatment, the participants who reported the highest levels of competitiveness were not allowed to participate in the auction. Then, we could directly compare bids from the participants with two different levels of competitiveness (higher competitiveness and lower competitiveness). Because the bids from the two treatments were found statistically the same, we can conclude that the consumer’s valuation for food products using the non-hypothetical experimental auctions are independent on the level of the participants’ competitiveness