Attitudes toward aquaculture and seafood purchasing preferences: Evidence from a consumer survey of Atlantic States

In this paper, we study the factors that influence consumer attitudes toward aquaculture as well as annual expenditure on aquaculture products. Our analysis is composed of two parts. First, we estimate the effects of several covariates of interest on annual seafood expenditure using a two-way censored regression model, due to the nature of the survey data. Our results indicate that consumers who are college-educated, aware of aquaculture operations in their area, and more aware about where their seafood is produced tend to spend more on farm-raised seafood. Second, attitude indices are used as dependent variables in three distinct logit regressions, one for each of the respective seafood categories, i.e., finfish, shellfish, and sea vegetables. For both the finfish and shellfish regressions, the results suggest that being older, being more informed about East Coast aquaculture operations, desiring at least state-level detail for production location, and looking closely at seafood labels more frequently were all associated with a lower probability of having a negative attitude toward aquaculture. Few explanatory variables had statistically significant effects in the sea vegetable regression, which is likely due to the low number of respondents in our sample aware of sea vegetable aquaculture operations (approximately 23%).