Factors Influencing the Willingness to Pay for Aquaponic Products in a Developed Food Market: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Your article “Factors Influencing the Willingness to Pay for Aquaponic Products in a Developed Food Market – a Structural Equation Modeling Approach” (sustainability-768295) is interesting since aquaponic products will be important in having a more sustainable food production in the future. However, there are possible to do some improvements in order to have a better article. I guess my recommendations are easy for you to implement. Hence, I look forward to read a new version of the article.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you very much for your time and efforts, your comments really helped to improve our manuscript. We highly appreciate your input. Please find the reply to your comments attached.

Kind regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript sustainability-768295, entitled “Factors Influencing the Willingness to Pay for Aquaponic Products in a Developed Food Market – A Structural Equation Modeling Approach”. You have prepared a very interesting piece of work that I am sure will catch the attention of journal readers. I would like to congratulate the authors for presenting a very attractive paper that is grammatically correct and flows properly. This is one of the best-written papers that I have had the opportunity to review, which made it a pleasant experience. Despite the good presentation, in my view the paper needs some review of the theoretical background and data analysis/results section, so it will consider critical variables reported in previous studies. Then, the article will be at the level required to be considered for publication. I recommend the authors to introduce the following changes:

 

General Comments:

1. The authors need to discuss why willingness to pay for aquaponics products is relevant. The authors need to better explain the contribution of this study.
2. Given the aquaponics products cannot be certified organic, the authors could report a difference in willingness to pay between aquaponics products that could be labelled as “Green Products” (safe) versus “Organic Products” (safest). Therefore, we can estimate the reduction in the premium price received by aquaponics products. I recommend the authors to review the paper entitled “Consumers’ perceptions, purchase intention, and willingness to pay a premium price for safe vegetables: A case study of Beijing, China” of Zhang et al. (2018). I leave the citation at the bottom in references.
3. Based on the theory of Planned Behaviour of Ajzen (1991), cited in this article, it is unclear why the familiarity with and knowledge about aquaponics only influences directly willingness to pay, but not purchase intention. I recommend the authors to adjust their hypotheses in line with Ajzen (1991) and Zhang et al. (2018).
4. Similarly, I recommend the authors the inclusion of the environmental subjective norm in the model, as it is not currently covered.
5. Another factor to consider in the analysis is safety perceptions as described in Zhang et al. (2018). Aquaponic products versus organic products.

 

Specific Comments

1. In line 101 in page 3, replace “Aquaponic is a major communication challenge because it is a rather unknown system of food production with a high degree of innovation…” with “Aquaponic products face a major communication challenge, because its food production system is unknown with a high degree of innovation…”.
2. In line 121 in page 3, replace “…, we suppose that knowledge of aquaponics has…” with “…, we expect that knowledge of aquaponics has…”.
3. Adjust font of lines 223 to 227 in page 8.

 

References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, 50, 179–211.

Zhang, B., Fu, Z., Huang, J., Wang, J., Xu, S., & Zhang, L. (2018). Consumers’ perceptions, purchase intention, and willingness to pay a premium price for safe vegetables: A case study of Beijing, China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, 1498–1507.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you very much for your time and efforts, your comments really helped to improve our manuscript. We highly appreciate your input. Please find the reply to your comments attached.

Kind regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an interesting study and the topic of this research is within scope for this journal. Unfortunately, the quality of your manuscript does not meet the requirements of Sustainability. In its present form it is not easy to read.

Barriers regarding the organization of manuscript are considerable and impairs the clarity of communication to the extent that I cannot easily follow your methods and results.

There are aspects of poor ‘finishing’ and it is hard to follow the paper due to its long size and to the mixing of content in sections (data analysis with method justifications).
Overall, I get the feel that you are insufficiently familiar with the journal and how papers are commonly presented.

I provide some suggestion to try to ameliorate the manuscript, since it presents severe shortcomings concerning the introduction, methodology, results and conclusion.

Introduction

The first part of introduction is well-written but in my opinion is too long. I suggest to shorten it, by creating a new section. I suggest to add an additional section (section two) on literature review.

In particular, I suggest to move from line 45 to line 79 in the new literature review section

 

Materials and methods

I believe that also this section is not well structured.

The methodology leads nicely different hypotheses. But perhaps is too large and not well focused.

Even in this case I suggest to shorten the length and move in the literature section the following lines:

From 101 to 120

From 129 to 144

From 161 to 178

From 187 to 199

While the hypotheses should be included in the introduction

In short I suggest to begin the methodology by starting from the page 6

 

Line 221 Table is too large, I suggest to reduce it and check all paper by observing carefully the guidelines for authors

 

Literature review:

I suggest to add an additional section on literature review. Authors should briefly address the most important and relevant topics consistent with their study.

 

Results

The results section is not well defined and too confused. As a fact the text included from 244 to 261 should be reported in the methodology section, since it does not contain the results of survey. It is not

I suggest to rewrite entirely this section, by analyzing only main outcomes of study.

 

Conclusion:

Authors should present and synthetize only main outcomes of their study analysing more in depth main implications for producers and academicians, trying to explain how the empirical results could be reasonably extended to other national contexts.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you very much for your time and efforts, your comments really helped to improve our manuscript. We highly appreciate your input. Please find the reply to your comments attached.

Kind regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thanks for the opportunity to review the new version of your manuscript sustainability-768295, entitled "Factors Influencing the Willingness to Pay for Aquaponic Products in a Developed Food Market – a Structural Equation Modeling Approach". After checking this new version of your article and the rebuttal letter, I am glad to report the Editor that you have addressed my comments properly.

All the best on your research work.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors correctly addressed the comments and suggestions of referee. Paper in this version can be publishable.