Decoding the Interplay of Front-of-Pack Labels, Price, and Consumer Perceptions: Impact on Food Choices in Korea and Singapore

The investigators will conduct experiments in both Korea and Singapore, focusing on two settings with various food items: restaurant menu choices and grocery item selections. For each item, investigators will elicit consumers' prior belief about its healthiness. Our research builds upon the work of Haws et al. (2017), which demonstrated that US consumers tend to overgeneralize their belief about "expensive=healthy" to product categories where it is not true. This tendency potentially biases perceptions of healthy foods. The investigators aim to test this "expensive=healthy" intuition and its impact on food choice, with and without FOP labels, in Asian contexts. The investigators hypothesize that absent FOP labels, consumers will infer healthiness from price information (i.e., this product is expensive, so it must be healthy) and that providing FOP labels will reduce the reliance on this inference. The investigators also hypothesize that such effects of FOP labels are more prominent for products where the perceived healthiness by consumers significantly differs from the healthiness indicated by the labels. When the FOP labels show 'less healthy' for those expensive and perceived as 'healthy' products, consumers will update their prior belief about its healthiness and be more likely to drop the intuition 'expensive=healthiness' in decision-making and respond to a greater extent.