2025: Maribel Rodriguez Perez
University of Florida
Project Title: Using Hypothetical Purchase Tasks to Evaluate and Reduce the Reinforcing Value of Meat.
Maribel Rodriguez Perez is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Florida working under the supervision of Dr. Meredith Berry in the Department of Health Education and Behavior. Her research interests involve applying behavioral economics to understand human decision-making regarding environmentally sustainable behaviors, particularly through dietary choices.
She has been awarded the 2025 Innovative Student Research Grant to support her ongoing dissertation work, which focuses on using behavioral economics demand to quantify the valuation of animal product consumption and testing different strategies to reduce it.
Meat consumption is a global concern due to its direct negative impact on the environment, human health, and animal welfare. Research on meat reduction has primarily focused on measuring attitudes and intentions. Maribel’s project offers a novel behavioral approach to quantify meat purchasing using demand analysis, a method that will allow the prediction of meat consumption behavior beyond attitudes and intentions. This method would enable rigorous determination of the potential effectiveness of various interventions (i.e., behavioral manipulations, messaging strategies).
Her work thus far has demonstrated the initial incremental reliability and validity of a hypothetical meat purchase task and shown the potential applications of demand analysis for measuring meat consumption. The SABA grant will continue to support these efforts by allowing her to establish the ecological validity of this task and test its utility across larger and more diverse populations.
This project will offer valuable insights into the application of behavioral economic assessments for meat consumption with direct implications for improving public health, environmental conservation, and animal welfare. Additionally, this project will inform numerous future directions for behavior analytic and behavioral economic research relevant to public health. Such as the utility of the cross-price elasticity of meat and other plant-based alternatives to identify effective substitutes for meat and other animal products. This may have direct translational applications for marketing and public policy, such as labeling, meat taxation, and subsidies for alternative plant-based foods.
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