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Considering the temporary closure of many food-away-from-home establishments, consumer expenditure on groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased. While grocery shopping is an essential activity, not much is known about the dynamic relationship of the COVID-19 pandemic to the behavior of grocery shoppers. With an objective to inform variability in the behavior of grocery shoppers under various scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted an online framed choice experiment to elicit preferences for purchasing methods, time windows, minimum order requirements, and fees. The manipulating factor relates to the trend in the COVID-19 pandemic, where we consider three scenarios: an increasing, decreasing, or constant number of new cases in the past two-week period. Using 32,400 choice decisions from a representative sample of 900 grocery shoppers in the United States, we conclude that the trend in the COVID-19 pandemic causes significant differences in grocery shopping preferences. In situations where COVID-19 is spreading at an increasing rate, consumers are generally less willing to shop inside the grocery store. When COVID-19 is spreading at a decreasing rate, the relative importance of the purchasing method attribute is lower in its entirety. We use our findings to inform recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

Due to natural phenomena like global warming and climate change, agricultural production is increasingly faced with threats that transcend farm boundaries. Management practices at the landscape or community level are often required to adequately respond to these new challenges (e.g., pest migration). Such decision-making at a community or beyond-farm level—i.e., practices that are jointly developed by farmers within a community—can be aided by computing and communications technology. In this study, we employ a translational research process to examine the social and behavioral drivers of adoption of smart and connected farm networks among commodity crop farmers in the United States. We implement focus groups and questionnaires to bring to the fore views on the use of digital technologies in collaborative contexts. We find that participating farmers are concerned with several issues about the potential features of the network (e.g., the ability to ensure data validity while maintaining data privacy) and the nature of their interactions with the various stakeholders involved in the network management. The participatory approach we adopt helps provide insights into the process of developing technologies that are both actionable and trusted by potential end users.

By randomizing the order in which participants perform a cognitive test and a food choice task in a controlled experiment, we investigate whether cognitive capacity can be enhanced by the simple act of anticipating food intake. Our findings show that overweight and obese participants exhibit an anticipatory food reward effect, which helped enhance their mental resources and improve their performance in a cognitive test. However, we find no anticipation effect among normal weight participants. Furthermore, eye tracking data reveal that food temptation, in the form of visual attention and emotional arousal is higher for overweight and obese individuals when they are cognitively impaired.

We implement a framed field experiment to understand and rationalize previous contradictory calorie labeling findings showing mostly decreasing or null effects, but also some evidence of increasing calorie intake. Our study suggests that the numeric value of calorie information alone is not sufficient to explain the impact of information on food choice, but it is the gap between an individual calorie reference point expectation and the realized actual amount that influences food choices. We manipulate this gap in a carefully controlled experiment creating meals that look nearly identical but substantially differ in their calorie content. There is a sharp contrast in the literature with a large body of research only examining the effect of providing the calorie content for a meal while ignoring individual consumers’ expectations. Understanding the underlying mechanism driving calorie information response is crucial for designing and implementing effective calorie interventions and policies.

This study evaluates the psychological impact of stay-at-home extension orders during COVID-19 and its relationship with individuals’ expectations on the duration of the extensions. An online survey was administered to 1259 US adult residents to measure symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and stress induced by different stay-at-home order extensions using hypothetical length scenarios. We find that individuals exposed to two 2-week order extensions exhibit higher levels of stress and anxiety compared to those exposed to a single 4-week extension. We also find that subjects with longer expected extensions exhibit more signs of psychological damage than those with shorter expected extensions. Furthermore, we find that the negative psychological consequences of providing two shorter extensions is observed only among subjects with extension expectations of four weeks or less. Our results demonstrate that people’s expectations affect the level of psychological damage caused by lockdown mandates. Our findings suggest that whenever lockdown extensions are necessary, reduced psychological distress may be possible by implementing a one-time restriction, rather than extending multiple smaller extensions perhaps due to manipulation of personal expectations.

Consumers often inadvertently misperceive the health hazards associated with over-the-counter pesticides under the current textual labeling policy, potentially leading to improper use. We conducted an incentivized framed field experiment with eye tracking to evaluate the effectiveness of the current pesticide labels that convey risk using signal words (Caution, Warning, Danger) compared to two visually focused label alternatives: traffic light colors and skull intensity symbols. A total of 166 participants were randomly assigned to one of three label formats and asked to rank toxicity levels and make purchasing decisions within multiple price lists. Results show that signal words fail to adequately communicate toxicity levels. Specifically, participants’ correct assessment of toxicity level dramatically improves from 54% under the existing signal word label to 95% under the traffic light and 83% under the skull intensity symbol labels. We also find that participants are more likely to choose the less toxic alternatives under the new labels, suggesting the current labeling system may affect choice and have unintended adverse effects on human health.

Growing evidence suggests that resource scarcity can severely impede individuals’ cognitive capacity, resulting in sub-optimal decision making. Few experimental studies investigate whether food deprivation as a form of resource scarcity influences decisions in other non-hunger related domains. We examine the effect of short term fasting on cognitive capacity by exogenously manipulating individuals’ fasting time in a laboratory experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: 1) 3-hour fast; 2) 12-hour fast; and 3) control, in which participants were not required to fast and consumed a protein shake upon arriving to the lab. Following the manipulation, participants completed the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test which measures cognitive function. Although we find null treatment effects on cognitive ability, our results provide evidence that short term fasting does not directly inhibit cognition.

Cognitive biases play an important role in creating and perpetuating problems that lead to foodborne illness outbreaks. By using insights from behavioral ethics, we argue that sometimes people engage in unethical behavior that increases the likelihood of foodborne illness outbreaks without necessarily intending to or being consciously aware of it. We demonstrate these insights in an analysis of the 2011 Listeriosis outbreak in the U.S. from the consumption of contaminated cantaloupes. We then provide policy implications that can improve our understanding of other kinds of disease outbreaks and epidemics.

Beginning and female farmers are crucial for the succession of the next generation of farming. Despite policy interventions to provide access to credit, land, and capital, little is known about whether the end‐market consumers support the business ventures of beginning farmers and their products. Using an incentivized online experiment, this study assesses consumers' willingness to support beginning and female farmers in direct monetary donations, real effort volunteerism support, and willingness‐to‐pay for products. The results show that consumers, in general, do not differentiate their support for beginning farmers relative to generic farmers except in the case of voluntary effort exertion.

To meet the grand challenges of agricultural production including climate change impacts on crop production, a tight integration of social science, technology and agriculture experts including farmers are needed. Rapid advances in information and communication technology, precision agriculture and data analytics, are creating a perfect opportunity for the creation of smart connected farms (SCFs) and networked farmers. A network and coordinated farmer network provides unique advantages to farmers to enhance farm production and profitability, while tackling adverse climate events. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in SCF including the advances in engineering, computer sciences, data sciences, social sciences and economics including data privacy, sharing and technology adoption. More specifically, we provide a comprehensive review of key components of SCFs and crucial elements necessary for its success. It includes, high-speed connections, sensors for data collection, and edge, fog and cloud computing along with innovative wireless technologies to enable cyber agricultural system. We also cover the topic of adoption of these technologies that involves important considerations around data analysis, privacy, and the sharing of data on platforms. From a social science and economics perspective, we examine the net-benefits and potential barriers to data-sharing within agricultural communities, and the behavioral factors influencing the adoption of SCF technologies. The focus of this review is to cover the state-of-the-art in smart connected farms with sufficient technological infrastructure; however, the information included herein can be utilized in geographies and farming systems that are witnessing digital technologies and want to develop SCF. Overall, taking a holistic view that spans technical, social and economic dimensions is key to understanding the impacts and future trajectory of Smart and Connected Farms.