Description:  Department Seminar: Michelle Segovia (University of Missouri)

Location: 368A Heady Hall

Contact Person: David Hennessy

Title: Do consumers discriminate against minority entrepreneur farmers?"

Abstract: Given the large global efforts to promote agriculture entrepreneurship, in this article, we evaluate whether a beginning farmer’s gender and racial background affect consumer’s market value of agricultural products, monetary support, and volunteering effort-exertion support. We conducted a large incentivized online experiment with 1,459 consumers in the U.S. where we exogenously manipulate the race (i.e., White, Hispanic, and Black) and gender (i.e., male and female) of a beginning farmer’s food label in separate between-subject treatments. Overall, we find no significant treatment effects on willingness-to-pay for the food products, monetary donations, and effort-exertion allocation, suggesting that subjects do not discriminate beginning farmers based on their race or gender. However, when we account for treatment compliance, we find that highlighting any race in the treatment label reduces subjects’ support towards beginning farmers; this negative bias varies by support type. Moreover, we test for heterogeneous treatment effects by subject’s race and gender and find that White subjects are positively biased towards White female beginning farmers in terms of product valuation.