Can Household Consumers Save the Wild Fish? Lessons from a Sustainable Seafood Advisory

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. Abstract: Conservation organizations seeking to reduce over-fishing and promote better fishingpractices have increasingly turned to market-based mechanisms such as environmentalsustainability labels (eco-labels) in order to shift patterns of household consumption.This paper presents an analysis of consumer response to an advisory for sustainableseafood adopted by a regional supermarket in the United States. The advisory con-sisted of a label in which one of three traffic light colors was placed on each freshseafood product to inform consumers about its relative environmental sustainability.Green meant “best” choice, yellow meant “proceed with caution,” and red meant “worstchoice”. Using a unique product-level panel scanner data set of weekly sales and takingadvantage of the random phase-in of the advisory by the retailer, we apply a difference-in-differences identification strategy to estimate the effect of the advisory on overallseafood sales as well as the heterogeneous impact of the advisory by label color andwhether the seafood met additional health-related criteria. We find evidence that theadvisory led to a statistically significant 15.3% decline in overall seafood sales, a statis-tically significant 34.9% decline in the sale of yellow labeled seafood, and a statisticallysignificant 41.3% decline in the sale of yellow labeled seafood on a mercury safe list.We find no statistically significant difference in sales of green or red labeled seafood. Abstract Conservation organizations seeking to reduce over-ﬁshing and promote better ﬁshing practices have increasingly turned to market-based mechanisms such as environmental sustainability labels (eco-labels) in order to shift patterns of household consumption. This paper presents an analysis of consumer response to an advisory for sustainable seafood adopted by a regional supermarket in the United States. The advisory consisted of a label in which one of three traﬃc light colors was placed on each fresh seafood product to inform consumers about its relative environmental sustainability. Green meant “best” choice, yellow meant “proceed with caution,” and red meant “worst choice”. Using a unique product-level panel scanner data set of weekly sales and taking advantage of the random phase-in of the advisory by the retailer, we apply a diﬀerence-in-diﬀerences identiﬁcation strategy to estimate the eﬀect of the advisory on overall seafood sales as well as the heterogeneous impact of the advisory by label color and whether the seafood met additional health-related criteria. We ﬁnd evidence that the advisory led to a statistically signiﬁcant 15.3% decline in overall seafood sales, a statistically signiﬁcant 34.9% decline in the sale of yellow labeled seafood, and a statistically signiﬁcant 41.3% decline in the sale of yellow labeled seafood on a mercury safe list. We ﬁnd no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerence in sales of green or red labeled seafood. to the FishWise an eco-label adopted by a regional supermarket chain on the West Coast of the United States. The Advisory consisted of a label placed on every fresh seafood product to inform consumers about its relative environmental sustainability. The labels used a traﬃc light color schematic: green meant “best choice,” yellow meant “proceed with caution,” and red meant “worst choice”. We take advantage of the random, phased introduction of the Advisory, and apply a diﬀerences-in-diﬀerences identiﬁcation strategy to estimate the eﬀect of the Advisory on sales overall, on sales by label color and on sales as an interaction with additional health-related information.