Does Knowledge-Based Economy Speaks to Consumers? A French Case Study with Respect to Food Products

The paradigm of knowledge-based economy states that information asymmetry between consumers and producers will be reduced thanks to information availability and dissemination through the Internet or other media channels. Conversely to this statement, some published articles shown that knowledge-based economy reinforces the information asymmetry between experts and novices among the consumers (Hogg et al., 2007; Gregan-Paxton & Roedder-John, 1997; Alba & Hutchinson, 1987). Accordingly, we will consider the non homogeneity of consumers and will try to identify and qualify the differences between several groups of respondents regarding two food items by means of a k-means clustering applied to a knowledge-oriented questionnaire.