Marketing Seminar（2019-05）

Topic: How Long Does This Food Last? Effect of Perceived Healthiness of Food on Expiration Date Judgments

Speaker: Christine Kim, Assistant Professor,The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Time: Wednesday, 08 May, 13:30-15:00

Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

Despite the important role that expiration dates play in shaping consumers’ food decisions, information about foods’ expiration dates is often absent or ambiguous. The current research examines how consumers infer expiration dates in such cases, and how such inferences influence their subsequent decisions.Building on the literature on categorization and inference learning, the current research proposes that consumers rely on a food item’s perceived healthiness as a cue to infer its expiration dates, thereby forming an intuition that healthy food expires quickly. This intuition is developed because consumers generalize highly perishable characteristic of the most typical member of the healthy food category (i.e., fresh produce) to other category members. Five studies demonstrate that consumers hold an intuition that healthy food expires more quickly than non-healthy food. Moreover, two studies illustrate the consequences of this intuition in two important food decision domains— food waste and food choices for later consumption. Specifically,our findings show that consumers are more likely to discard food framed as healthy (Study 4) and less likely to choose healthy food if it is to be consumed later (Study 5), because they perceive healthy food to expire more quickly.

Keywords:expiration dates, food decisions, food waste, categorization, inference learning

Introduction:

Professor Kim is an assistant professor in the Hong Kong University of Science and technology. She received her Ph.D in Marketing from Insead, Master in Havord University. Her research interests are Time perception, Busyness, Impulsivity and Motivation.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!