Scientific research has confirmed that among the infectious diseases that threaten human health, more than 200 infectious diseases are zoonoses and can be transmitted from animals to humans (World Health Organization, 2020), and among these zoonotic diseases, more than 130 have been found in China. In this study, live pigs were chosen as an example. The WHO and The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have pointed out that there are six major infections in pigs, namely, swine fever, transmissible gastroenteritis, swine influenza, piglet paratyphoid, piglet colibacillosis, and swine pneumonia. Although swine fever can only infect pigs, anthrax can infect almost all mammals, including humans (Sheng, 2009). In recent years, outbreaks of new infectious diseases worldwide have become more frequent. These new infectious diseases have a common feature, in that they are related to animals to varying degrees and 70% of them are zoonotic (Iannetti et al., 2019). Although the causes of emerging zoonotic diseases are very complex, the disregard of people for animal welfare is a leading reason. A typical case is the influenza A (H1N1) global epidemic, which started in Mexico and the United States in 2009. In that year, the WHO confirmed a total of 29,080 cases of H1N1 in 79 countries and regions; 226 cases were confirmed in mainland China. The virus emerged from a pig farm in Mexico, where sewage flowed and where pigs were close-packed. Poor pig welfare contributed to the tragedy of the global pandemic (Wu, 2020). Thus, food quality and food safety are often linked to the food production methods (Harper and Henson, 1999), and poor animal welfare treatment, such as crowded environment and unclean diet, greatly increases the probability of animal diseases and the risk of their spreading from animals to humans through the food chain (European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), 2019; Iannetti et al., 2019). On the contrary, in the process of animal breeding and slaughtering, giving good animal welfare treatment can reduce the probability of animals suffering from diseases, enhance animal immunity, and improve the quality and safety of the meat (Gavinelli et al., 2007; Hartung et al., 2009; Velarde et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019).

To suppress zoonotic diseases, reduce food safety issues, and improve the quality of meat products, animal welfare should be effectively protected in the process of livestock and poultry breeding, transportation, and slaughter (Zhao, 2010; Yang and Hong, 2019). However, improving the welfare of livestock and poultry would inevitably have an impact on the production costs and benefits for producers (Gocsik et al., 2016; Vissers et al., 2019). These measure whether to implement the production that takes welfare into account based on the economic feasibility of animal welfare plans and special market needs (Nocella, 2009; Mulder and Zomer, 2017). In China, consumers generally have low awareness of animal welfare, not realizing the internal connection between animal welfare protection and human health, and the market demand for meat produced meeting animal welfare needs is not sufficient to stimulate the welfare-related production behaviors among livestock and poultry producers (Gu, 2017; Ma, 2019). Thus, most livestock and poultry farmers generally ignore animal welfare issues in their pursuit of production efficiency and profit maximization, resulting in frequent outbreaks of quality and safety issues in relation to various meat products (Hartung et al., 2009; Deng and Xiao, 2017). To improve the welfare of livestock and poultry animals in China, it is thus necessary to scientifically formulate the marketing strategies that would expand the market demand for livestock and poultry products with animal welfare attributes taken into consideration based on the consumer preferences to stimulate the welfare production behaviors among livestock and poultry producers.

Using the traditional rational choice theory, scholars have studied the preferences of consumers and their willingness to pay for animal welfare-related attributes in the production of livestock and poultry products, i.e., whether consumers would choose animal welfare-friendly livestock and poultry products with maximum utility under their budget constraints. However, the context effect based on the modern decision-making theory overturns the traditional rational choice theory, indicating that the context has a systemic influence on the preferences and choices of consumers, thus leading to the bounded rationality of the decision-making behaviors of consumers (Bettman et al., 1998; Novemsky et al., 2007; Sun et al., 2017). The decoy effect is a context effect, i.e., after adding new options to a commodity selection set, the probability of an alternative option in the commodity selection set being selected by consumers will increase (Huber et al., 1982; Brenner et al., 1999; Park and Kim, 2005). Heath and Subimal (1995) found that the decoy effect is pervasive in consumer preference. Analyzing the decoy effect can help us understand consumer behaviors more accurately and reduce the deviations in consumer preference in study conclusions (Trueblood et al., 2014; Noguchi and Stewart, 2018). However, few studies have analyzed the decoy effect in the consumption behavior of consumers in relation to livestock and poultry products that had been produced with animal welfare attributes in consideration from the perspective of decision-making under bounded rationality. To better assist companies market livestock and poultry products with animal welfare attributes that were taken into account, this study used yellow-feathered broilers and pork hindquarters as cases and introduced decoy scenarios based on the animal welfare attributes to analyze whether there exists a decoy effect in the consumption behaviors of consumers in relation to livestock and poultry products with animal welfare attributes taken into account and to compare the decoy effect strength of animal welfare attributes of different products.

The emergence of decoy products highlights the pros and cons of options in a selection set (Brenner et al., 1999), which can help decision-makers reduce cognitive load and simplify decision-making (Nowlis et al., 2010). From the perspective of value transfer, decoy products change the attribute ranking of selected products, making the target products has a comparative advantage (Pettibone and Wedell, 2000). As shown in Figure 1, in the core set containing products A and B, a decoy product D_C with a subjective value similar to product B is set. Compared with product B, if the decoy product D_C has utility benefit on the attribute Y but has utility loss on the attribute X, consumers may choose product B based on simplified decision-making and loss aversion. Thus, when the optimal decoy product is designed, the high-quality performance of the main product can be significantly highlighted (Herweg et al., 2017), and scholars have carried out studies on how the decoy effect affects the purchasing decision of consumers and its strength.

Many factors affect the decoy effect, but Müller et al. (2014) believed that the most basic condition for the occurrence of a positive decoy effect is the ability of a decoy product to trigger consumer trade-offs and comparisons with the target products. Therefore, consumers who rely on intuitive reasoning (Mao and Oppewal, 2012) and who use the intuitive information processing mode (Mourali et al., 2007) are more likely to generate a decoy effect. Hamilton et al. (2007) found that when the number of product attributes is large, the consideration of consumers for all attributes would be difficult, and a few attributes with higher utility would have a stronger decoy effect. Scarpi (2008) focused on analyzing the strength of the attraction effect under the situations of background information, real decoy¹, and phantom decoy² and also found that when the decoy situation and the background situation contrasted in guiding consumer behaviors, the decoy effect was more effective, and the attraction effect of the phantom decoy was stronger than that of the real decoy. Frederick et al. (2014) used lottery games and television purchases as examples and found that when the product attributes were represented as graphics, shaded areas, and other perceptions that could be directly experienced, the decoy effect might be reduced, eliminated, or even reversed, while only when the product attributes were represented by numbers, grades, and other similar concepts, the decoy effect was relatively obvious. Zhang and Liu (2017) used fitness packages as an example and found that increasing a fixed fee decoy for deterministic payment and an extra fee decoy for uncertain payment in a package service increases the probability of the target alternative being selected, but the fixed fee decoy for deterministic payment had a stronger attracting effect. Schumpe et al. (2020) found that setting text prompts as a decoy before shopping advertisements can divert the resistance of consumers to shopping advertisements, which is manifested as a greater willingness to purchase. Wu et al. (2020) used traceable pork hindquarters as a study case and found that when consumers made consumption choices in a non-induced situation and then made choices in a situation with inductive information, the decoy effect was relatively stronger, while the direct creation of the decoy situation had a relatively small impact on the purchase selection behaviors of consumers.

Nonetheless, some studies have shown that decoys may fail and even have a resistance effect in the process of the purchases of consumers. For example, when consumers are more knowledgeable about a product, or purchase products based on the experience rather than product descriptions, they are less affected by the decoy situation (Dhar and Glazer, 1996; Putrevu and Lord, 2001; Mourali et al., 2007; Hadar et al., 2018). Costanigro and Lusk (2014) used food labels that indicated ethylene ripening in food as decoys to explore the acceptance of consumers of food labels that indicate the genetic modification. The results showed that prior exposure to such labels did not lead to significant differences in consumer aversion to genetically modified foods. Attwood et al. (2020) used high-priced vegetarian food as a disadvantage decoy to induce consumers to choose a sustainable vegetarian diet. Their findings showed that the addition of the high-priced vegetarian decoy did not significantly change the number of consumers who chose the target vegetarian food and competitive meat. The reason for this may be that the price decoy set in the experiment failed to inspire and induce the utility weighing mechanism of consumers. Similarly, Ohlhausen and Langen (2020) compared the attractiveness of descriptive dish labels with that of decoy options and found that labels can positively affect the sustainable consumption of consumers, while decoy dishes reduce the probability of choosing target dishes. A possible reason for this may be that the decoy attributes failed to make consumers perceive the utility differences between the target and competing dishes. In addition, Rogers et al. (2020) have also attempted to use decoy programs to encourage smokers to participate in a specified number of smoking cessation meetings, but the time decoy failed to guide smokers to increase their choice of target programs. It could be that the decoy strength was too low or that quitters saw “attendance time” not as an opportunity cost but as a benefit. Evidently, successful decoys should be able to influence the relative value judgment of consumers on the attributes of selected products and induce them to choose appropriate target products based on the value judgment mechanism.

In summary, for consumer purchase behaviors, decoy products may trigger a positive decoy effect or cause decoy failure. So far, there have been few studies on consumer behaviors in relation to livestock and poultry products with animal welfare taken into consideration under different decoy scenarios; thus, it is difficult to provide a scientific basis for the marketing of livestock and poultry produced with animal welfare in consideration. Hence, this study took two common meat products, namely, yellow-feathered broilers and pork hindquarters, as examples and designed decoy products according to different attributes (including three attributes related to animal welfare, namely, the breeding time, breeding model, and diet cleanliness label, as well as price attributes). The purpose was to explore whether these four types of attributes have a decoy effect on the purchase behavior of consumers concerning livestock and poultry meat products and to compare the value difference of the decoy effect of the same attribute in different purchase situations of livestock and poultry products. Based on the above considerations, the assumptions were made as follows:

We applied the following experimental design and launched a specific implementation plan to achieve our experimental goal.

This study took yellow-feathered broilers and pig hindquarters, i.e., the two common meat products, as specific experimental products, and set three attributes connected with animal welfare (i.e., breeding time, breeding model, and diet cleanliness label) and price attributes to discuss whether each attribute has a decoy effect in the purchase behaviors of livestock and poultry products of the consumers, and compared the difference between the decoy effects of the same attribute in different products. The main conclusions are as follows: In the yellow-feathered broiler and pig hindquarter consumption experiments, setting decoy products based on the four types of attributes can all trigger positive decoy effects on the purchasing decisions of consumers. In the chicken consumption experiment, the order of effectiveness of the four types of attribute decoy was as follows: breeding model > price > diet cleanliness label > breeding time. In the pork consumption experiment, the order of effectiveness of the four types of attribute decoy was as follows: diet cleanliness label > price > breeding model > breeding time. It can be noted that in the chicken purchase decisions, the attributes that reflect cultural traditions and habits of raising broilers were more likely to trigger consumer comparison and trade-offs of decoy chicken and target chicken, while in pork purchase decisions, attributes connected to pork quality and safety were more likely to trigger consumer comparisons and trade-offs between decoy pork and target pork. Correspondingly, the breeding model of broilers and the diet cleanliness of live pigs had the highest decoy effects on consumption behaviors in relation to yellow-feathered broilers and pig hindquarters, respectively.

Accordingly, we put forward the following suggestions for government departments and related enterprises: (1) In promoting animal welfare-friendly livestock and poultry products, government departments should strengthen the promotion of the concept and levels of livestock and poultry welfare and the relationship of animal welfare to promote meat quality and safety, so that consumers can better understand the connotation and function of animal welfare attributes, such as breeding time, breeding model, and clean diet, and guide consumers not only to judge based on the price attributes when purchasing livestock and poultry meat but also to make choices based on the attribute level of animal welfare. (2) When promoting broiler products and pork products with animal welfare attributes, sellers can combine the finesse of decoy strategies to design a reasonable marketing plan for the livestock and poultry meat market. For example, appropriately setting up the chicken products with inferior breeding model attributes or inferior price attributes, and pork products with inferior diet cleanliness label attributes or price attributes, and utilizing the sensitivity of consumers to target attributes and the deviation of information processing mechanisms to guide the purchase choices of consumers for high-welfare meat products and encourage producers to improve the welfare of livestock and poultry.

The study also has certain limitations. First, the expansion set in this experiment contained four types of products, compared with the expansion sets containing three types of products in the studies of Sellers-Rubio and Nicolau-Gonzalbez (2015), Liu and Chen (2019), and Rogers et al. (2020), which may limit the identification of consumers of dominant products and limit the strength of the decoy effect. In addition, the method of comparative choice experiment adopted in this study is a hypothetical experiment without real monetary delivery behavior, and the stated preference of consumers for products may deviate from the actual consumption choice. Finally, our study was based on a representative city in China. The validity and applicability of our findings can be verified against a larger variety of geographical and cultural settings.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of Jiangnan University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

LX proposed the research direction, designed the structure of the study, and wrote the manuscript. MY designed the questionnaire and analyzed the data. XC revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.