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Abstract
Generic promotion and advertising activities have traditionally been used to promote
individual agricultural commodities. However, there is renewed interest in implementing a
mandatory ―broad-based‖ promotion program for all fruits and vegetables, and this idea is highly
controversial among those in the horticultural industry. Here we use data from an experiment
that introduces subjects to various promotional efforts for fruits and vegetables to estimate the
direct and indirect effects of advertising. Econometric results indicate that commodity-specific
promotional efforts may be less effective at increasing demand for fruits and vegetables than
earlier studies have suggested, yet such campaigns do appear to have a significant clockwise
rotational effect on the demand for fruits and vegetables. Broad-based advertising does have a
direct effect on the demand for fruits and vegetables, and after controlling for various
demographic differences between treatments our results show that average willingness-to-pay for
fruits and vegetables was 41% higher among subjects in the broad-based group compared to the
control group.