The impact of online shopping on food stockpiling behaviour in China

ABSTRACTFood stockpiling is a common strategy to cope with food shortages, especially during major crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the effects of online shopping on household food stockpiling behaviour, using data collected from urban residents in China. Unlike previous studies considering only binary decisions, we take into account two-stage decisions (whether to stockpile and how much to stockpile). We employ a novel double-hurdle two-stage least square approach to model the sequential decision-making process and to address the endogeneity issue of online shopping. The empirical results show that online shopping significantly increases the probability that households choose to stockpile food and stockpiling ratio. Online shoppers in Eastern China are more likely to stockpile food, while their counterparts in the Western region tend to have a higher food stockpiling ratio. Online shopping significantly increases stockpiling ratio of perishable food such as fruits and vegetables relative to non-perishable food such as grains.KEYWORDS: Online shoppingfood stockpilingCOVID-19 pandemicChinaJEL CLASSIFICATION: L66L86 AcknowledgmentsWe would like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Qinan Lu for his valuable support throughout this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingLian Xia, Dan Wang and Jian Li acknowledge the financial support from the National Social Science Foundation Major Project [22&ZD079], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72173052; 71803058], the China Agriculture Research System [CARS-50], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2662021JC00].