Beyond Attendance: Spanish Consumer Valuation of Multiple Extra Virgin Olive Oil Attributes and the Credence Dimension

ABSTRACT Spain, the world's leading olive oil producer, faces increasing pressure to shift from price‐based competition towards quality‐based differentiation. Although prior research has examined consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) attributes, limited evidence exists on how consumers value and trade off multiple credence‐based quality labels, such as organic and various protected designation of origins (PDO), when they appear in the same EVOO bottle. Moreover, the potential bias arising from attribute non‐attendance (ANA) in a context of multiple European Union (EU) quality certification schemes on food choices remains largely unexplored. This study addresses these gaps by exploring consumers' WTP for organic and PDO certifications to determine which of the two generates a comparatively higher valuation. The analysis uses data from an online choice experiment conducted in Spain. By explicitly incorporating ANA into the discrete choice modelling framework, we account for the possibility that consumers consciously or unconsciously ignore certification attributes during decision making, thereby improving behavioural realism and WTP precision. The results reveal three key findings. First, PDO‐labelled EVOO, particularly locally produced PDO oils, generates significantly higher utility and WTP than organic certification. Second, organic certification yields comparatively lower marginal valuation, suggesting that consumers perceive origin‐based quality signals as more salient than environmental production claims in this market. Third, models that fail to account for ANA overestimate certain attribute effects and exhibit weaker performance, confirming the methodological importance of incorporating ANA when analysing multiple credence attributes.