On the Use of Multi-Unit Auctions in Measuring Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Food Products

This paper proposes the use of multi-unit auctions in studying consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for food products in a multi-unit shopping scenario. We show how this method can overcome the limitations of single-unit experimental auctions in obtaining useful information related to WTP for not just the first unit but also subsequent units of a product, the demand curve, consumer surplus, the determinants of consumers’ WTP for each auctioned unit, and the effect of potential price discount strategies.