Label or taxes: why not both? Testing nutritional mixed policies in the lab
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
We test fiscal and labeling nutritional policies in the lab with real product sales on representative consumers. Labels work better than fiscal interventions, and policies are strongly subadditive when combined.
nutrition
label
behavioral public policy
Abstract
We run an incentivized framed laboratory experiment to evaluate the interaction of labelling (Nutri-Score) and pricing policies (fat taxes and thin subsidies) on the food shopping of a sample of French consumers. Taxes and subsidies, designed to fit Nutri-Score, are differentiated according to their magnitude (large or small), and their salience (explicit or implicit). We exploit a difference-in-difference design, whereby subjects shop for real from a catalog of 290 products twice, first without any labelling nor pricing policy, and then a second time with one of five different combinations of labelling and pricing policies. Results show that: (i) when implemented alone, taxes and subsidies are less effective than labelling, especially when implicit and when small in magnitude; (ii) policies mixing pricing and labelling are strongly sub-additive; (iii) consumers would benefit from such policies in terms of expenditure at the expense of the State.