Risk, Uncertainty and Regulation: A Comparison between France and Germany in the Field of Food Safety and Nutrition

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This project will study consumers’ decisions in a context of food risks and the resulting regulations aiming at thwarting these risks. We will focus on the role of consumer information as a regulatory tool. This project will build a bridge between our understanding of individuals’ behaviour when facing risk and the design of regulation for limiting risk. We seek to answer the following questions: How do consumers act when they face risks and how do their reactions differ by nationality, being French or German? What are the consequences of these differences on regulatory choices at both national and European levels? Our methodology combines sociological and economic tools. As food safety and nutrition encompass various contaminants/ bacteria and many nutrients across numerous food products, the study will be organised in two parts focusing either on one contaminant or one product. The first part will look at a single food contaminant, namely dioxin, that is found in products such as fish or dairy products. A sociological methodology will be used to analyse the regulatory framing, emphasising the determination of advisories/warnings and the handling of scientific uncertainty when informing consumers in France and Germany. The second part will focus on a specific product, namely yogurt, presenting both benefits, e.g. obesity prevention, and risks, e.g. dioxins. Economic laboratory experiments will be conducted in France and in Germany to provide a cross cultural comparison of behavioural changes resulting from consumer information. Different framings of health information will be presented to consumers in this experiment. The results will be evaluated with regard to the consequences for risk regulation. The differences in valuations of risk information between French and German consumers, before and after the experiment, will be analysed based on questionnaires and interviews and will allow integrating the sociological and economic analyses.