Economics of Animal Welfare 2026: a research overview

Market Concentration in the Chicken Industry

Anya Marchenko · Brown University in progress

An industrial-organization look at how ownership concentration in US chicken processing shapes prices and production practices. A closely related open-access study (Saitone et al., 2025) finds three decades of consolidation raised wholesale broiler prices about 16% while lifting bird yields about 2%, a benchmark for what concentration does to the sector. Concentration in poultry also runs through the contract-grower system, where a few vertically integrated processors hold monopsony power over the farmers who raise their birds — a channel through which market structure can feed back into how animals are housed and grown.

RelevanceMarket power in processing is a lever on welfare, not only on price: concentration that pushes higher throughput and yields tends to favour faster-growing, higher-density systems, so an IO question doubles as a welfare question and as a target for antitrust or procurement policy.

A Chicken in Every Pot: WWII Food Rationing and the Rise of the Broiler Industry

Luis Mota Freitas · Northwestern in progress

An economic-history account of how wartime rationing and policy seeded the modern broiler industry, showing how a chicken-heavy diet was shaped as much by supply policy as by consumer pull. Mota Freitas, a Northwestern economics PhD researcher (and NBER affiliate) working on technology, policy, and consumer markets for animal products, pairs this history with separate work estimating how much consumers value the ongoing cage-free egg transition.

RelevanceChickens are the largest farmed land-animal welfare burden by sheer numbers. If that demand was partly engineered by mid-century policy rather than fixed taste, the scale of the problem is historically contingent — which means policy can move it again.

Taking a Bite Out of Meat, or Just Giving Fresh Veggies the Boot?

Jessica Hope · Stanford (Humane and Sustainable Food Lab) in progress

The displacement question. Hope, a research scientist at Stanford's Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, uses discrete-choice and menu-based studies to ask whether plant-based options displace meat or mostly displace other plant foods. The answer sets how large the welfare payoff of plant-based growth actually is.

RelevanceDisplacement is the multiplier on every demand-side intervention. If new plant-based sales mainly cannibalise salads, the animal-welfare benefit is near zero; if they replace chicken, it is large. This is the single number that most changes the cost-effectiveness of the plant-based transition.

Persuasive Messaging Shifts Choices Towards Plant-Based Food

Josh Tasoff (with Thomas-Walters & Anthis) · Claremont Graduate University published

A large incentivized experiment on how message content moves real-stakes choices toward plant-based products: 4,871 participants across 14 message modules, with the plant-based option's relative valuation rising about $10 on average. The authors report that health- and environment-framed appeals tended to travel further than animal-welfare appeals, though effects varied widely by message and audience. Read on SSRN.

RelevancePuts a credible ceiling on what demand-side persuasion can achieve, and — if the framing result holds — cautions that the welfare case, though central to the movement, may not be its most persuasive public message.

Predicting and Understanding the Effects of Livestock Regulation (and Innovation)

Charlotte Siegmann · MIT in progress

A framework for how livestock regulation and new technology, including alternative proteins, reshape production and welfare outcomes.

RelevanceRegulation and alternative-protein innovation are the two largest plausible shifts in how animals are farmed. A framework that predicts their effects ex ante is exactly what funders and policymakers need to compare those very different bets on the same scale.

Humane Handling in the Food Sector

Jay Shimshack · University of Virginia (Batten) in progress

Enforcement-and-compliance economics applied to humane-handling rules. Shimshack is an environmental economist and co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management whose core work measures whether inspections and penalties actually deter; here he asks whether that machinery changes behavior in slaughter and handling.

RelevanceA welfare rule's real effect equals its enforcement. Deterrence estimates are the gap between a standard on paper and less suffering in practice — and they tell regulators where an extra inspection dollar buys the most welfare.

To Measure the Welfare of Any Species

Loren Fryxell · University of Oxford in progress

A principled, choice-based method to put different species' welfare on a common scale. It extends Fryxell's axiomatic theory of "experienced utility," which derives a cardinal, comparable welfare measure as the integral of moment-to-moment preference intensity (hedonic flow) over time — a modern, choice-grounded revival of Edgeworth's hedonometer, offered as an alternative to ad hoc moral-weight conventions.

RelevanceAlmost every cross-species cost-effectiveness figure rests on contested moral weights chosen by convention. A defensible measurement foundation is the missing piece that would let that entire literature rest on something firmer than assumption.

Non-Anthropocentric Cost-Benefit Analysis Based on Animals' Willingness to Pay

Sara Dusel & Christine Wieck · University of Hohenheim published

A critical review distilled into a practical checklist for doing CBA and social welfare functions that give animals standing — including the provocative idea of grounding valuation in animals' own "willingness to pay," inferred from their behaviour, rather than only in human preferences. European Review of Agricultural Economics (2025).

RelevanceTurns an abstract debate into a usable checklist for animal-inclusive CBA, while flagging the citizen-consumer gap: even "non-anthropocentric" monetisation still leans on human willingness to pay, which overshoots actual price premiums.

The Political Market for Animal Welfare

Romain Espinosa · CNRS in progress

Treats welfare policy as the product of a political market. It builds on Espinosa & Treich's "Animal Welfare as a Public Good," which models altruistic consumers choosing both how much meat to eat and its welfare-quality, and shows the market equilibrium delivers too little quality and too much quantity — a public-good failure that only collective or political action can correct. The related Animal-Welfare Levy (Espinosa & Treich, forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association) gives the pricing logic: a Pigouvian levy that can run to dozens of euros per chicken under intensive systems but only a few euros under organic ones.

RelevanceThe levy is the cleanest worked example of pricing animal welfare as an externality, and its results invert the usual climate-tax ranking — hitting chicken and pork hardest while turning into a subsidy for beef. That tension is unavoidable for any combined climate-and-welfare policy.

A Policy Valuation Tool to Help Support Government Policy Making: A Case Study of the UK

Richard Bennett · University of Reading in progress

A practical tool to value welfare impacts for UK government policy appraisal. It builds on Bennett's long line of work — going back to his 1995 study valuing farm-animal welfare — on converting a single composite welfare score into monetary benefits that slot into official cost-benefit, informed by his decade on the UK Farm Animal Welfare Committee.

RelevanceThis is welfare science translated into the cost-benefit numbers that actually move official decisions. Demand for animal-inclusive policy is moot without a supply of credible valuations that fit existing appraisal frameworks; this is that supply.

The Social Value of Animal Welfare: A Revealed Policy Preference Approach

Trevor Woolley in progress

Infers society's implicit valuation of animal welfare from the policies people actually vote for, rather than from stated-preference surveys. In his work the case is California's Proposition 12 — the 2018 cage-free ballot measure that passed with about 63% support despite raising egg prices — where he estimates shoppers' marginal willingness to pay for cage-free eggs from retail scanner data and recovers voters' valuations from a precinct-level structural voting model. The identifying idea: purchases reveal a private (Nash-equilibrium) valuation, votes reveal a total (Lindahl-equilibrium) one, and the gap measures the public, non-use value of animal welfare.

RelevanceRevealed-preference valuation sidesteps the hypothetical bias that inflates survey-based willingness to pay, giving an independent cross-check on how much welfare society actually values — and where stated and revealed values diverge.

Integrating Animal Welfare into Economic Policy

Stefan Thewissen (with Rik Dillingh) · Nyenrode Business University in progress

How to bring animal welfare into mainstream economic-policy appraisal: the machinery of impact assessment, indicators, and cost-benefit inside government. Their manuscript, "Animal welfare in economics" (under review), is notable for its authorship — Thewissen, a beyond-GDP wellbeing economist now at Nyenrode, and Dillingh both come out of CPB, the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis that vets Dutch government policy.

RelevanceThe institutional plumbing — indicators and impact-assessment routines — without which even a perfect welfare valuation never reaches a minister's desk. Complements the valuation papers by addressing how numbers get used, not just how they are produced.

The Human-Animal-Welfare Trilemma

Andy Stawasz · Harvard Law (Animal Law & Policy) in progress

Frames a trilemma among competing welfare objectives and argues you cannot fully satisfy all of them at once. Stawasz, moving from Harvard's Animal Law & Policy Program to a Michigan Law fellowship, has argued in related work that federal cost-benefit analysis omits the interests of the billions of animals regulations affect.

RelevanceA structured way to name the trade-offs any animal-inclusive policy framework must confront head-on, and a bridge between the economics and the legal-regulatory side of getting animals counted in official cost-benefit analysis.

What are the Most Important Questions in Animal-Welfare Economics?

Closing discussion, led by Kevin Kuruc

An open agenda-setting session on the field's priority questions, led by Kuruc (Middlebury / UT Population Wellbeing Initiative), who has argued for treating animal welfare as an economic externality (Nature Food, 2023). Day 2 also includes a graduate-student project-pitch session.

RelevanceThis is where the field signals which questions it judges most worth rigorous work — directly useful for prioritising which papers and questions deserve in-depth evaluation and funding.

The Economics of Cellular Agriculture

Jonathan McFadden & Sharon Raszap Skorbiansky (with Monica Saavoss) · USDA ERS published

The government's economic primer on cellular agriculture: market drivers, industry structure, regulation, and challenges. USDA ERS Report ERR-342 (2024). The authors' forward-looking work on cell-cultivated product supply extends this baseline.

RelevanceThe neutral public baseline on cultivated-meat economics. Its candid finding that life-cycle cost estimates span a wide range is a useful corrective to headline cost-and-timeline claims that drive a lot of investment and advocacy.