Antimicrobial resistance, which decreases the efficacy of antibiotics and other antimicrobials, has led to concerns about the use of antibiotics in livestock production. Consumers play an important role in influencing producers’ decisions about the use of antimicrobials through their choices in the marketplace, which are driven by attitudes toward these practices. This study examines consumers’ levels of concern about (and acceptance of) the use of antibiotics in livestock production for four objectives: to treat, control, and prevent infections, and to promote growth. Results reveal that the majority of respondents were highly concerned about antibiotic use to promote growth in livestock production and considered this use to be unacceptable. Participants with higher objective knowledge of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic use in livestock production were more likely to accept antibiotic use to treat and control disease, but less likely to accept its use to prevent disease or to promote growth. Participants with high levels of trust in the livestock industry were more likely to accept antibiotic use to control and prevent infections and to be neutral about antibiotic use to promote growth in food animals. Respondents who believed that antibiotic use decreases animal welfare were more likely to be very concerned about antibiotic use to treat, prevent, and control disease, and less likely to accept antibiotic use to treat diseases in food animals. The study findings should be of interest to producers considering the adoption of sustainable technologies and production practices, food retailers making procurement decisions, and policymakers identifying policies that can alleviate antimicrobial resistance in the agri-food sector.

The study examines the relationship between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments of a food firm, an activist’s incentive to target the firm to uncover and deter fraudulent behavior, and the firm’s incentive to commit food fraud. Specifically, we develop a game theoretic model to analyze the strategic interaction between a food firm that decides whether to provide a credence food attribute and whether to misrepresent the quality of its product, and an activist who decides whether to monitor the firm and launch a campaign to uncover and remove false/misleading quality claims. We further examine the effect of CSR and the activist’s presence on the level of quality the firm provides. We derive the conditions under which an activist will find it optimal to monitor the firm to uncover fraudulent quality claims and the firm will find it optimal to misrepresent its product quality. Analytical results show that the greater the firm’s CSR investments, the less likely it is that the activist will find it optimal to monitor the firm, and the more likely it is that the firm will find it optimal to misrepresent its product quality. Results also show that the firm is more likely to misrepresent its product quality when its effectiveness in contesting the activist’s campaign is relatively high, and more likely to actually provide a high-quality product when the cost of the credence attribute is relatively low.

Research has documented direct negative impacts of crises, such as COVID-19, on people’s mental health. However, evidence is limited about how these events impact decision-making through direct influences on choices, or by indirectly changing decision-making through mental health effects. Research on avoidance behaviors suggests that affective states influence decisions to access healthcare and receive diagnoses. While there is significant evidence that hopelessness related to a potential health threat impacts decisions to learn about that threat, affective responses to crises may also cause spillovers to decision-making in other domains. In this study, we examine linkages between exposure to a stressor (COVID-19-related income loss), feelings of hopelessness, and foregoing or delaying healthcare across multiple cross-sections of the US Census’s Household Pulse Survey, featuring 2.76 million survey responses collected between April 23, 2020, and July 5, 2021. After removing observations with missing data for dependent variables, the final sample size is just under 2.3 million responses. We conduct ordered logistic regressions of the relationship of income loss with hopelessness levels, and logistic regression of the relationship of income loss and hopelessness levels on health care access. We additionally report versions of the regressions with demographic variables and time and state fixed effects to control for important factors related to those variables. We conduct a mediation analysis to estimate the pathway of income loss acting through hopelessness. The analyses find that experienced income loss predicts significantly higher levels of hopelessness (odds ratio (OR)=1.68 (95%CI = 1.67, 1.69)). Both hopelessness and income loss are, in turn, associated with healthcare access—an increased likelihood of foregoing and/or delaying needed medical care (e.g., hopelessness nearly every day (OR=4.18, 95%CI = 4.13, 4.23), experienced income loss OR=1.25, 95%CI = 1.24, 1.26)). A mediation analysis confirms that hopelessness significantly and consistently mediates approximately 30% of the relationship of COVID-19 income loss to foregoing/delaying healthcare.