题目：Promoting Healthy Diets at a Large Restaurant Chain

主讲人：Weijia Dai, Purdue University

时间：2024年5月21日（星期二）下午13:30-15:00

地点：暨南大学（石牌校区）中惠楼106会议室

主讲人简介：

(Daisy) Weijia Dai is an assistant professor of marketing at Purdue University Daniels School of Business. Her research interests focus on problems related to information economics and market intermediaries. The topics she works on include online trust and reputation, information disclosure, and advertising. Dai received a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland.

Abstract：

In the US, dietary habits linked to health issues, such as obesity, are often associated with socio-economic disparities. Research has highlighted lower nutritional quality consumption in disadvantaged neighborhoods attributed to limited healthy food access (“food deserts”) or consumer preferences influenced by socio-economic factors. In this paper, we examine the nutritional inequality generated from consumer choices of entrees in a restaurant setting where consumers need to trade off entree characteristics against its price. Using proprietary data from a large national restaurant chain, we show that people in more disadvantaged neighborhoods consume less healthy and higher-calorie entrees and are more sensitive to price discounts. We estimate a mixed logit discrete choice model of entrees and identify preference heterogeneity and entree demand elasticities by demographics. Counterfactual analyses indicate that disparity in dietary healthfulness stems largely from heterogeneous consumer preferences instead of pricing inequality across stores. Specifically, consumer preferences for calorie content play a more important role than preferences for healthfulness in driving the disparity. Further counterfactuals demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted price adjustments in disadvantaged neighborhoods to mitigate nutritional inequality but also underscore their constraints in bridging the gap among demographic groups within a neighborhood.