TY - JOUR AU - Tavárez, Héctor AU - Álamo, Carmen AU - Nieves, Edgardo AU - Flores, Christian PY - 2021/01/01 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Using contingent valuation to estimate consumers’ willingness to pay for differentiated coffees in Puerto Rico JF - The Journal of Agriculture of the University of Puerto Rico JA - JAUPR VL - 105 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.46429/jaupr.v105i1.19632 UR - https://revistas.upr.edu/index.php/jaupr/article/view/19632 SP - 1-21 AB - <p>Product differentiation is a strategy used to develop products with particular&nbsp;attributes valued by consumers who are willing to buy them at higher prices.&nbsp;We use a single-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation method&nbsp;through in-person interviews (N=575) to estimate consumers’ willingness to&nbsp;pay (WTP) for high-quality and regular coffees produced locally. The results&nbsp;show that consumers are willing to pay $13.60 for a 227-g (8-ounce) bag of highquality&nbsp;coffee produced locally and $10.90 for regular coffee produced locally.&nbsp;It may be inferred that consumers are willing to pay $2.70 more for high-quality&nbsp;coffee, holding all else constant, which suggest that consumers value more the&nbsp;attribute of being locally produced than that of quality. The results also suggest&nbsp;that household size, income and education level of consumers can affect&nbsp;WTP values. We provide evidence that additional revenue can be generated&nbsp;by producing differentiated coffees. However, a cost analysis is required to&nbsp;complement this study and to better understand the economic viability of&nbsp;producing coffee with the characteristics evaluated in this investigation.</p> ER -