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Containing big soda: countering inducements to buy large-size sugary drinks

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-21, 10:08 authored by Paul W. Dobson, Ratula Chakraborty, Jonathan Seaton
Health concerns about overconsumption of large portions apply to a wide range of highly calorific foods and drinks. Yet, amongst all products, sugar-sweetened soft drinks and especially sugared soda are the ones which seem to raise the most ire because they contain little or no nutritional value beyond their sugar content and because of the way that vendors encourage excessive consumption by pricing jumbo-size portions to look like bargains while making smaller portions appear overpriced. This paper considers the logic of such extreme value size pricing and reveals why this marketing practice can harm economic welfare beyond public health concerns. The paper shows why policy interventions, including portion cap rules and soda taxes, seeking to reduce portion sizes and curb the consumption of large-size sugary drinks might fail when they do not fully take into account or appreciate the strategic responses that vendors might adopt to retain value size pricing.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant RES-000-22-3524).

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Business Research

Citation

DOBSON, P.W., CHAKRABORTY, R. and SEATON, J.S., 2017. Containing big soda: countering inducements to buy large-size sugary drinks. Journal of Business Research, 75, pp. 185-191.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-12-24

Publication date

2017

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Journal of Business Research and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.07.017.

ISSN

0148-2963

Language

  • en

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