Intertemporal choices: framing effect on household food waste

• Autor(a) principal: Fernandes, Nuno Filipe Rocha
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20868
• topic: Food waste; Over-serving; Risk aversion; Hyperbolic discounting; Nudging; Desperdício alimentar; Cozinhar em excesso; Aversão ao risco; Desconto hiperbólico

Food waste has several long-term implications for the environmental, economic, and social domains, with households assuming the major responsibility for these losses. Specifically, the fear of not being a “good” provider is linked to an over-serving behaviour. Despite literature suggesting that this over-serving behaviour could be due to a risk aversion effect towards facing status losses, this was never experimentally tested. So, we hypothesized that status losses would prevent people from reducing their served food quantities, and that this would be explained by a higher risk aversion towards these immediate losses. To accomplish that, 126 participants were presented with binary choice paradigms regarding hypothetical food quantities options (cook just the enough food vs cook more than the enough food). In a within-subjects design, where each of these two options were accompanied by a description of its possible consequences relatively to two different specific domains (environmental, economic, social, and status), we manipulated the temporal framing perspective of those consequences (immediate losses and delayed gains vs immediate gains and delayed losses). The results show that the salience of the status losses increased the served food quantities, while temporal effect had no significant effect in this relationship. Overall, our findings open a path for other researchers to explore the household food waste from an empirically perspective, as well as these have practical implications for consumers, for packaged goods managers, and for public policy officials, since these findings may be a useful insight towards the designing of effective food waste reduction nudging interventions.