Modelling consumer preferences for extra virgin olive oil: the Italian case

The paper summarizes the results of a research project concerning Italian consumers’ preferences as regards extra virgin olive oil and, in particular, it discusses an innovative statistical approach for modelling this type of data. The survey was carried out at the beginning of 2012 and was aimed at investigating the main key drivers of purchasing behaviour. Specifically, a class of models for ordinal data, namely CUB, have been studied in order to describe the importance that respondents assign to a list of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes and the level of agreement that consumers express with a number of statements concerning extra virgin olive oil. The CUB models allow measurement of the influence of the subjects’ covariates and the effect of different eating habits on consumers’ preferences.