Food health crisis and behavioral analysis.

Summary This paper discusses consumers' actual expectations regarding food safety and their predicted behavior in the event of a health crisis. We start from concepts developed in microeconomic theories of risk behavior and we review measures of the purchasing process for risky products both for health crises (what we call 'immediate risk') and for long-term processes (what we call 'diffuse risk'). We show why the consumer has a specific behavior when it comes to health risk related to food consumption and that this behavior is hardly compatible with the classical theory of utility expectation. Behavioral biases such as risk denial or non-rationalized boycotts are, on the contrary, much more often observed in reality, which leads us to believe that health safety should be considered as a due and not as a demand for quality in the economic sense.