When Cleaning Too Much Pollution Can Be a Bad Thing: A Field Experiment of Consumer Demand for Oysters

Oysters are a special kind of green product. They filter phytoplankton from water and thereby reduce nutrients, the primary driver of eutrophication of water that can consequently harm human health. Yet, where they can provide the most ecosystem benefit is in highly eutrophic waters and being raised in these 'polluted' waters may be an unattractive attribute for consumers. In this research, we use revealed-preference dichotomous-choice field experiments to test if and under what pollution mitigation circumstances oyster consumers will pay price premiums for oysters. The results from 290 adult participants in the Mid-Atlantic of the US suggest that providing information about eutrophication and oysters' ability to filter nutrients increases participants' WTP price premiums for oysters from low-nutrient waters and decreases their WTP price premiums for oysters from eutrophic waters with more nutrients. These results illustrate an important tension in how best to market green products like oysters, as the situations where they provide the most ecosystem benefits (in eutrophic waters) are also situations, which appear to raise the highest level of concerns among consumers. These results have implications on whether oysters should be actively marketed as a green product.