On April 3, 2014, ISET hosted Prof. Stephan von Cramon-Taubadel from the University of Göttingen, who presented his paper "European Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Israeli-Palestinian Peace Products".

The main finding of the paper is that the ethical side of food products has become increasingly important for Western European consumers. One example of the trend of ethical consumption is “peace products”, commodities produced in peaceful economic cooperation between members of conflicting parties in areas of political conflict. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Prof. von Cramon-Taubadel investigated the willingness of consumers from four European countries to pay for two food products jointly produced by Israelis and Palestinians.

Using random parameter logit models and the method of bootstrapping, due to the lack of representation according to age and education, they found that consumers in Great Britain and Germany are willing to pay a premium first off all for European products compared with products from Israel or the Palestinian Territories alone. The willingness to pay for Israeli/Palestinian peace products is lower compared to the surplus for European products. But the cooperation product is favored instead of a single county product, just from Israel or the Palestinian Territories. Hence, cooperation in the form of joint production of peace products would generate benefits. Prof. von Cramon-Taubadel also investigated how various demographic factors (income, age, gender, education) affect willingness to pay.

The presentation was followed by quite an extensive question session, during which Prof. von Cramon-Taubadel provided further details about the work he presented and the outlook of the ongoing research.