Date of Award
6-27-2025
Date Published
August 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Business Administration
Advisor(s)
Burak Kazaz
Subject Categories
Business | Marketing
Abstract
This dissertation comprises two essays to investigate how consumers make purchase choices under product quality variation and macroeconomic volatility. The analysis employs both analytical modeling and empirical methods to help businesses and policymakers in their efforts to foster sustainable and resilient agriculture and food supply chains. In this first essay, we focus on food retailers who have to deal with imperfect produce. We define imperfect produce as produce with cosmetic imperfections but perfect nutritious quality. We develop consumer choice models and consider three common retailing strategies to manage imperfect produce: Discarding, bunching with perfect produce, and differentiating imperfect produce from perfect produce with price discounts. The analysis identifies optimal strategies across varying market conditions and consumer preference profiles. In addition to the food retailers' strategies to sell imperfect produce, we also examine the impact of several policies pertaining to consumer awareness and food waste. Specifically, we evaluate two prominent food waste reduction policies — consumer education and relaxed grading standards — and demonstrate how such interventions may paradoxically increase food waste at the retail level. The second essay explores consumer purchasing behavior under hyperinflation in developing economies, illustrated through evidence from Türkiye’s beverage market. Leveraging transaction-level data from Türkiye’s largest kombucha producer, Kombucha 2200, we estimate a structural multinomial logit model to examine how inflation rates and inflation ambiguity --- stemming from discrepancies between the figures reported by different sources of organizations --- influence purchase decisions. The findings provide evidence that while higher inflation may accelerate consumption, ambiguity about the true inflation rate dampens demand due to increased uncertainty. Moreover, our results show that both higher prices and larger deviations between observed and expected prices are significantly associated with a lower likelihood of consumer purchase. Our study provides guidelines for policymakers in terms of the impact of reporting inflation rates to gain consumer confidence and stimulate the economy from the measure of consumer spend. Together, these essays make theoretical contributions to consumer choice modeling and provide practical implications for improving retailing strategies and policy design in dynamic market environments.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Yu, Haoran, "Consumers' Choice Models for Food and Beverage Businesses" (2025). Dissertations - ALL. 2160.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2160
