Evocation, an unfair commercial practice targeting Geographical Indications (GIs), can mislead consumers into believing that a generic product is comparable to a GI. This preregistered study involves 35 participants (16 males; mean age = 26.8, SD = 2.9) who completed purchase decision and evocation search tasks while their eye movements were recorded. The stimuli consisted of web listings featuring Italian GIs or generic products with variably evocative names.
Six areas of potential interest (title, label, price, description, ingredients, and URL) were considered, where the original denomination or its evocative counterpart could appear. Preregistered analyses focused on detection rates in the evocation search task and indicate, as predicted, that when evocative names were to be found in the URL, evocation detection was lowest than for any other placement. Additional exploratory analyses show: (1) an inverse correlation between evocation detection and purchase rates for generic products; (2) an effect of evocative strength in the purchase task, with higher purchase rates for greater perceived evocative power; (3) lower fixation proportions for the URL area, though participants with higher detection performance had more distributed fixation proportions across placements; (4) greater understanding of GIs (for both tasks) and propension for authenticity (only for the purchase decision task) were related to better performance.
This study provides valuable insights into online food fraud detection and identifies promising directions for future research on preventative interventions. This study was supported by a contribution from Fondazione VRT to ER and a grant from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (Excellence Department Grant awarded to the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy). Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy Correspondence to Paolo Frugarello or Elena Rusconi.
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