产地歧视效应、机制和对策

Place-of-Origin Discrimination:Existence,Mechanism,and Solution

本研究证实了新冠疫情影响下的产地歧视效应,即消费者对产自疫情更严重地区的常温包装产品表现出更低的购买意向,即使该产品不具备病毒传播的可能性。通过二手数据分析和行为实验相结合的研究方法,本文发现产地歧视效应具有跨地区、跨品类、跨样本的普遍性及时间上的持续性。该效应的诱因是消费者缺乏科学知识而过高估计产自疫区的常温包装产品传播新冠病毒的风险。因此,向消费者科普病毒传播知识可以有效削弱产地歧视效应。本文拓展了有关新冠疫情和行为免疫系统如何影响消费行为的研究,进一步丰富了原产地效应的理论模型。同时,本研究为企业和政府之后应对疫情冲击、恢复市场活力提供了策略建议。

This paper proposes an effect of place-of-origin discrimi-nation:consumers show a lower preference for products originating from a place with more severe COVID-19 diseases,even though the products are unlikely to spread coronavirus.Based on a food delivery dataset,as well as the data from two experiments,we show that the effect of place-of-origin discrimination occurs across populations,regions,and product categories,and it lasts for a relatively long time.We then show that the focal effect is driven by consumer overestima-tion of the infection risk induced by consuming products from places with severe COVID-19 diseases.This overestimation is caused by the lack of knowledge on the coronavirus.Therefore,science education can effectively mitigate the effect of place-of-origin discrimination.This paper contributes to the growing literature examining how COVID-19 and behavioral immunity influence consumer behavior,and more broadly the literature on the place-of-origin effect.In prac-tical terms,this paper provides important implications for firms and policymakers on how to recover from the CONVID-19 crisis.