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1. Introduction
Organic food is the fastest growing market in the food industry in many countries (Dettmann and Dimitri, 2010), including in Europe and South Asia (Al-Swide et al. , 2014). Moreover, in the last decade or so its production area and sales volume have achieved a compound annual growth rate of more than 10 percent (Willer and Kilcher, 2012). However, the rapid development of the organic food market has also exposed the fact that related studies, which have focussed on either exploratory understandings of consumer decision-making processes (Essoussi and Zahaf, 2008) or describing the nature of organic food and analyzing demographic variables (Dimitri and Oberholtzer, 2009; Lea and Worsley, 2005), have been unable to keep pace with developments in practice. For example, Lee and Yun (2015) note that existing studies on organic food lack a strong theoretical foundation.
In light of this, the author believes that it is necessary to better understand food behavior to construct the mindset of consumers of organic products. Given that people's food choices represent the outcomes of a complex process that is affected by multiple factors (Costell et al. , 2010), examinations of this issue also need to consider many factors, such as the food itself (taste) or certain non-food effects (e.g. cognitive information) (Atkinson and Rosenthal, 2014; Gerrard et al. , 2013). This study attempts to use the perspectives of multiple theories that have been frequently applied in the fields of retail and management (Pei et al. , 2014; Sarkis et al. , 2011) to integrate the theory of planned behavior (TPB) (consumer attitudes toward organic food), transaction cost theory (consumers and relational embeddedness in a channel), and signaling theory (consumer attitudes toward organic labels and organic food prices) to construct a comprehensive research framework. Using multiple theoretical perspectives, this study aims to better understand the roles and functions of organic food itself, organic food channels, and food labeling and certification systems, in addition to the moderating effects of organic food prices on the relationships among the above-mentioned variables.
2. Literature review
2.1. The relationships among attitudes toward organic labels, attitudes toward label sources, and organic-label trust
Consumers' overall assessment of whether they are willing to buy certain goods originates from the combined effects of trust in the...