A model of nutrition information search with an application to food labels

摘要

Due to the dramatic rise of several diet-related chronic diseases, nutrition information search behaviours have received significant interest from both the scientific and non-scientific literature. No other known paper in economics, however, has examined from a theoretical perspective the acquisition of nutrition information as a health-enhancing activity. We modify the standard health capital model (Grossman 1972) to allow the time spent on nutrition information search to be considered within the context of a time allocation decision. We then collected extensive primary data based on the theoretical model and used these to test the model.