Research

This paper examines whether tax on unhealthy food and nudge are suitable for promoting family healthy eating. In a theoretical model, we consider an economy composed of two types of families that differ in their income and nutritional knowledge, which reflects their misperception of the future health effects of diet, and choose their consumption according to their perceived utility. We find that the decentralized solution of taxation on unhealthy good achieves the first-best optimum if and only if the central planner can implement a targeted tax policy. Investigating the case of a mixed policy, we find that taxation of unhealthy food and nudge are probably complementary public policy instruments to promote family healthy eating. The mixed policy reduces the perception and income gaps between the two family types. Using a numerical simulation, we find that it is not necessarily the wealthiest people who eat healthier.

In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the influence of social norms on 300 parents’ beliefs regarding the nutritional quality of food items and their subsequent food choices. We use a 3 X 2 between-subject experimental design where we vary two factors: 1-the social norm provided to parents: a descriptive norm (what other parents choose) vs. an injunctive norm (what other parents approve of), and 2-the recipient of the food decisions made by parents: their own child vs. an unknown child. Parents participate in a two-stage process. In the first stage, we elicit their beliefs regarding the nutritional quality of various food items and ask them to make a food basket without specific information. In the second stage, based on their assigned treatment, they receive specific information and repeat the belief elicitation and the food basket selection tasks. We find that only the descriptive norm significantly reduces parents' overestimation rate of items' nutritional quality and significantly improves the nutritional quality of only parent’s food baskets. Injunctive norm significantly improves the nutritional quality of both, the parent's and child’s baskets.

This paper analyzes the impact of the public decision-maker on the intergenerational transmission of food preferences. We develop a theoretical model of food preferences inter-generational transmission in which parents transmit their own food preferences to their children through their food practices but also have a concern for the future public health conditions influenced by their feeding efforts. We find that, even if people fully care about future public health, the mechanism of food preferences transmission leads to a heterogeneous population where unhealthy food preferences persist. In this setup, we show that public interventions (public good provision and nutritional education program) induce a distribution of food preferences which converge to an homogeneous population with healthy food preferences.