Preference of Chinese food production enterprises to government regulatory Information--A choice experiment approach.

ABSTRACT

In recent years, despite the fact that the Chinese government is closely monitoring food safety, the perception of food production enterprises is not obvious. The reason is that information asymmetry hinders the effective transmission of regulatory information to food production enterprises. In the present research, a choice test is conducted to explore the preference of decision-makers for the information on government regulations in 224 food production enterprises with violations. It is found out that the decision-makers of food production enterprises have a strong preference for the regulatory information released by local governments. With a preference for reference information, compared to those who violate the law just once, decision-makers in food production companies that have several infractions exhibit a high "reference dependence" mentality. Also, the preference of different decision-maker characteristics shows an evident heterogeneity, as does the preference of various enterprises for the regulatory information about food safety. It is recommended that the government should improve the mechanism of disclosing the information about food safety, and focus on tailoring the information to different types of enterprises.