We employed Vickrey auctions to generate willingness-to-pay (WTP) data for
red meat traceability and related product characteristics with comparable
experimental auctions in the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Japan. The
results show that subjects are willing to pay a nontrivial premium for
traceability, but the same subjects show even higher WTP for
traceability-provided characteristics like additional meat safety and humane
animal treatment guarantees. The implication is that producers might be able
to implement traceable meat systems profitably by tailoring the verifiable
characteristics of the product to consumer preferences.