Huachao Gao: Infectious Disease Salience and Consumer Food Waste

报告时间：2022年5月11日（星期三）上午9：00-11：00

报告地点：线上报告（腾讯会议：485-779-5687）

报告人：Huachao Gao

工作单位：维多利亚大学

举办单位：威廉希尔

报告简介：

Consumer food waste and infectious disease are two extremely important yet understudied and unconnected topics in consumer research. This research provides a theoretical synthesis and shows that infectious disease salience increases consumer food waste. This occurs because when infectious disease is salient, consumers tend to feel disgust and have a high health consciousness. Given consumers’ belief that leftovers or passed best-by-date foods are contaminated, dirty, and unhealthy, the feeling of disgust and the high health consciousness motivate consumers to discard these foods. The results from one secondary dataset, one field study, and two experiments provide convergent support for the proposed effects. More importantly, in three additional experiments, we identify food safety education, resource scarcity, and hand washing as boundary conditions under which consumer food waste is mitigated regardless of infectious disease. Through this research, we contribute to consumer food waste, infectious disease, disgust, health consciousness and the related literature. The findings also provide practically actionable strategies to reduce consumer food waste in the era of global pandemic, which makes infectious disease constantly salient in consumers’ minds.

报告人简介：

Huachao Gao is Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business at the Gustavson School of Business and the Gustavson Scholar of Business, University of Victoria. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Texas at San Antonio in 2016. His research interests include on cross-cultural consumer behavior, consumer identity in the era of globalization, pricing, luxury consumption, and consumer food waste. As a behavioral research, he is not only interested in experimental design, but also interested in combining multiple methods such as empirical modeling, field study, and lab experiments to provide more comprehensive test for theories. His papers are published on major marketing journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He serves on the editorial review board of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Consumer Behavior. He is also the ad hoc reviewer for multiple marketing and business journals.