Consumer Behaviour, Market Dynamics, and Welfare Measurement

Meet Vicky Cox

Vicky is Senior Research Manager at Ambitious Impact (AIM) leading their animal welfare research to identify new charity ideas to be launched through its Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program and mentoring animal welfare focused participants of its Research Program.

Before joining the AIM team, Vicky went through the CE Incubation Program. Prior to this, she was a research intern for AIM, primarily completing the priority country research for our recommended animal charities. She did this internship alongside her Maths with Actuarial Science degree at the University of Southampton, where she helped to found an effective altruism society. Vicky went vegan and became interested in effective altruism in 2016, after reading works by Peter Singer.

Suggested Projects

1. I think we still have quite a lot of uncertainty around displacement in animal production. How much does a reduction in demand for animal products actually cause a reduction in supply? This covers both how elastic/reactive is supply to changes in demand and import/export considerations.

2. Additionality vs substitution for plant-based products. There has been research suggesting that people buy plant-based products alongside animal products when trying them for the first time and then most consumers typically aren't repeat consumers of these products. So increased sales or things like price parity may not actually decrease meat consumption, or at least it's definitely not the case that x% increase in plant-based product consumption = x% decrease in meat consumption (also related to the above). I'd like to have a better sense of when and why this happens and if we have any estimates for the % of plant-based production consumption that is just additionality rather than substitution.

3. More paintrack-like explorations of other animals (eg. Paintrack for hens). Would also be interesting to compare how bad the different pain types are compared to each other (moral weights of different types of pain).