Nudging consumers’ choices for niche milk: A real purchase experiment

Abstract

Changing behaviours causing poor health is an ongoing global health challenge that requires developing adequate food policies and strengthening their effectiveness. Policies based on nudging have become increasingly popular internationally, but the literature provides mixed evidence of their effectiveness, with an intense academic debate. This study contributes to the debate by investigating the effect of different nudging techniques (availability enhancement, visibility enhancement and healthy eating calls) via a framed field experiment involving purchases of milk types. Participants were split into different nudging treatment groups and were endowed with a cash amount to purchase any desired quantity of the different products. We modelled observed choices via the multiple discrete–continuous nested extreme value model, which has yet to receive attention for the analysis of nudging effects on food choices. Results show that only the healthy eating call nudge effectively drove participants towards healthier milk choices, while the effect of other nudges is statistically insignificant. We provide simulated demand curves conditional on nudging treatments, which measure the effect of the latter on consumers’ consumption levels of the different milk types available.