An Explorative Study on Heuristic Effects of Healthy Food Labels in an Online Shopping Situation

Abstract This study focuses on the representativeness heuristic effects of healthy food labels on consumer choice of healthy food. A within-subject experiment was arranged to identify whether consumers rely on representativeness heuristics when making a series of choices of food. Determining whether healthy food labels bias their choice under these limitations was of particular interest. Results (n=30) showed that some participants tend to develop a representativeness heuristic for choice in a series of food choices. For some consumers, healthy food labels do, to some extent, cue them into making biased choices. These results reveal that some consumers do find comparing healthiness of products tedious and rely on representativeness heuristics when making a choice. However, the use of healthy food labels specifically as a cue is very limited when other objective cues such as nutrition information are readily available.

[1]  James C Hersey,et al.  Effects of front-of-package and shelf nutrition labeling systems on consumers. , 2012, Nutrition reviews.

[2]  Donald A. Hantula,et al.  Microworlds for experimental research: Having your (control and collection) cake, and realism too , 1998 .

[3]  Chris Arney Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness , 2015 .

[4]  Pradeep K. Chintagunta,et al.  An Empirical Analysis of Shopping Behavior Across Online and Offline Channels for Grocery Products: The Moderating Effects of Household and Product Characteristics , 2010 .

[5]  John R. Nofsinger,et al.  Trading Performance, Disposition Effect, Overconfidence, Representativeness Bias, and Experience of Emerging Market Investors , 2007 .

[6]  Colin Camerer,et al.  The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and Capital-Labor-Production Framework , 1999 .

[7]  B. Brehmer,et al.  Experiments with computer-simulated microworlds: Escaping both the narrow straits of the laboratory and the deep blue sea of the field study , 1993 .

[8]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[9]  Darko Polšek,et al.  Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein NUDGE. IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS , 2009 .

[10]  Dhruv Grewal,et al.  Internet retailing: enablers, limiters and market consequences , 2004 .

[11]  H. Garb The representativeness and past-behavior heuristics in clinical judgment. , 1996 .

[12]  Carter A. Mandrik Consumer Heuristics: the Tradeoff Between Processing Effort and Value in Brand Choice , 1996 .

[13]  B. Swinburn,et al.  Government regulation to promote healthy food environments – a view from inside state governments , 2012, Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity.

[14]  Laura A. Brannon,et al.  The representativeness heuristic: influence on nurses' decision making. , 2003, Applied nursing research : ANR.

[15]  K. Stanovich,et al.  Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? , 2000, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.