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- Title
How Meat Demand Elasticities Vary with Price, Income, and Product Category.
- Authors
Lusk, Jayson L.; Tonsor, Glynn T.
- Abstract
As US beef and pork prices approached record high levels in 2014, industry analysts expressed surprised at consumer response. Because the relative price swings have occurred only recently, traditional approaches to demand analysis that rely on historical data series may be less useful than is typically the case. Employing one of the largest and longest-running choice experiments, we analyze data on 110,295 choices made by 12,255 consumers observed over a year-long time period coinciding with historically high meat prices. Our findings reveal nonlinear demands for meat products, with demand being more inelastic at higher prices. Ground beef, steak, and pork chop demands are more sensitive to changes in chicken breast price than the reverse. Moreover, cross-price elasticities between disaggregate meat products shrink as prices rise. Consumers' incomes significantly affect demand interrelationships. Higher income consumers are more likely to choose steak and chicken breasts and are less likely to choose ground beef, chicken wings, and deli ham than are lower income consumers. High-income consumers tend to be less responsive to ownprice changes and more responsive to cross-price changes than lower income consumers. This analysis provides estimates of structural demand parameters that help explain current meat expenditure patterns, and the results have implications for the assumption of linearity often invoked in policy analyses.
- Subjects
MEAT industry; MEAT sales &; prices; ELASTICITY (Economics); ECONOMIC demand; CONSUMER behavior
- Publication
Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy, 2016, Vol 38, Issue 4, p673
- ISSN
2040-5790
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/aepp/ppv050