Three Essays On Modeling Household Food Purchase Behaviors

This dissertation consists of three essays investigating household food purchase behaviors, focusing on modeling household binary purchase choices and expenditure decisions. The findings reveal factors that are influential on the formation of healthy and/or unhealthy dietary choices and provide insights for producers, retailers, and public health policymakers. The first essay proposes a new estimator for multivariate binary response data, a data feature of growing interest in the study of consumer behavior. This study considers binary responses as being generated from a truncated multivariate discrete distribution. The new estimator is shown to have attractive properties through Monto Carlo simulations and empirical applications. Comparisons are made to the traditional multivariate probit model. Because multivariate binary response modeling is frequently required in areas such as marketing, household behavior, crop selection, and conservation practices, among others, findings are of interest to both econometricians and practitioners. The second essay investigates the effects of demographic and socio-economic factors as well as outmigration, a special issue in Poland, on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol. This study takes advantage of second-hand survey data collected from a household panel by Poland's Main Statistical Office (GUS) that is not publicly available. Due to the addictive nature of tobacco and alcohol, this study uses a censored system to model the correlated consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Findings provide insights for the reduction and prevention of tobacco and alcohol use. The third essay provides a holistic profile of fresh produce choices and expenditures, including expenditure on fresh produce, frequency of purchase, variety of selection, and use of deals and coupons. A profile of consumers by consumer group was developed using 2014 Nielsen Homescan panel. This study intends to present a holistic picture of consumer disadvantage in terms of fresh produce consumption and take an all-inclusive approach so as to seek out commodities as well differences in fresh produce shopping behaviors across four consumer groups.