Consumer Food Choices and the Value of Time

Abstract

The foods we eat are a special class of commodities that we must physically consume and metabolize in order to live. Intuitively, people understand that time--or lack thereof--plays a role in their food choices. Yet, time is often left out of consumer food choices modeled in economics. This dissertation seeks to gain improved insight about food consumption decisions by exploring their temporal nature. Part I approaches food and time from a behavioral economics perspective through an experiment designed to estimate the temporal discount rate for food consumption. Parts II and III are an in-depth exploration of how to incorporate the opportunity cost of time into food demand systems. The first approach (Part II) incorporates leisure time as a good into a complete demand system to eliminate the opportunity cost bias and estimate the elasticity of substitution between food and leisure. The second approach (Part III) develops and tests two methods to correct for the opportunity cost of preparation time using food purchase data alone.