期刊名称：Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Agrarökonomie
印刷版ISSN：1815-1027
出版年度：2003
期号：13
出版社：Facultas
摘要：Our food products have got a lot of attributes, so-called credence attributes which can not be observed by the consumer either at the point of sale neither after consumption, e.g. the level of pesticide residues for vegetable food or the level of animal welfare for animal food. Because of this asymmetric information about the value of credence attributes market failure can occure due to opportunistic behaviour of the better informed party. Labeling the value of credence attributes can alleviate asymmetric information. During the last years the number of food labels has been rapidly increasing. A majority of these la bels are quality marks for high-quality schemes, e.g. bio labels. These quality marks do not explicitly label the guaranteed values of the different credence attributes, they just indirectly denote the characteristics of credence attributes. For example bio labels guarantee the ban on chemical fertilizers, the forbiddance of pesticides, minimum standards on animal welfare, etc. in the agricultural production, although it may not be mentionned explicitly on the aliments. The crucial prerequisite to decrease asymmetric information about the value of credence attributes by these quality marks and therefore to reduce potential market failure is that consumers perceive the indirectly labelled attributes correctly.
