Urban Residents’ Green Agro-Food Consumption: Perceived Risk, Decision Behaviors, and Policy Implications in China

Abstract

With the continuous improvement of living quality, food safety and healthy consumption awareness of urban residents have increased significantly. Green agricultural products marked as healthy, safe, and nutritious have become popular. At present, green agro-food is boosted by markets and policies in China, but consumers’ trust is not optimistic. Based on the theory of perceived risk and planned behavior, this research constructs a model to analyze the decision-making of urban residents’ green agricultural product consumption from the aspects of personal attitude, perceived risk, and subjective norm. Through a questionnaire survey of 329 residents in Tianjin, the empirical results show that: (1) Personal attitude and subjective norm positively affect residents’ willingness to consume. (2) Perceived risk negatively affects residents’ willingness to consume. (3) Functional risk has the highest impact, followed by time risk, financial risk, and psychological risk. In this regard, urban residents’ consumption of green agro-food could be continuously explored and promoted from the aspects of traceability supervision, circulation efficiency, and product brand and publicity.