Analyzing Consumer Willingness to Pay for Chicken without Antibiotics in Mashhad

Production of healthy food products is one of the most important goals of sustainable development of agriculture and society health. Awareness about the behavior of consumers is important to ensure about profitability of production of healthy food products. This study is done to investigate the factors affecting consumers' willingness to pay for chicken without antibiotics in Mashhad. Required data is gathered by random sampling and completing questionnaires from 340 households in 2014-2015. Contingent valuation method and estimating ordered logit model are used to identify the factors affecting consumers' willingness to pay. Results showed that about 19 percent of consumers would not to pay additional amount for buying chicken without antibiotics compared with conventional chicken and 6 Percent willing to pay a premium price were less than 5%. While 55% of people were willing to pay 15 percent additional amount and 20% of them were willing to pay 30% additional amount for buying chicken without antibiotics compared with conventional chicken. Among the studied variables, income of household, education, awareness about characteristics of chicken without antibiotics, health care index, amount of chicken consumption, the number of family members and people who are sensitive to a variety of antibiotics in family have had significant positive effect on willingness to pay for chicken without antibiotics. Also price of chicken without antibiotics has had significant negative effect on dependent variable. Age and gender had have no significant effect on willingness to pay. 29% of respondents have believed high price is the most important problem and 27% of them have believed the absence of proper advertising is the most important problem to buy this product. According to the results, advertising in public media to increase consumers' awareness and subsidy payments for production and consumption of this product are suggested.