REFRESH aims to provide new information on consumer and business performance applying behavioral economics approaches intended as the study of the influence that psychological, cognitive, emotional, heuristic and cultural considerations exert on economic agents’ (individuals, organizations) decisions. The identification and analysis of the socioeconomic conditions and driving factors that influence consumers’ choices and businesses’ decision in the creation and/or reduction of food waste, can support the design of more effective policy and market interventions to prevent and reduce food waste. Methodologically, the work takes advantage of different modelling approaches as Agent-Based Models (ABM) and Bayesian Networks (BN).

This work is part of a collection of reports on household food waste prediction for EU28, member countries and European regions. The collection consists of this methodological report "A roadmap to reduce food waste in Europe", which represents the theoretical base for two additional reports, "Pan-European scenarios of food waste levels" and "A pan-European simulation of selected interventions", where food waste scenarios for EU28 and for each European country are presented.

This report adopts a Bayesian hierarchical mixed-effects modelling approach, based on previous REFRESH works ("Model integration - Integrated socio-economic model on food waste" and "Behavioural Economics: Linking Bayesian and agent-based models to assess consumer food waste"), to quantify the relationships between socioeconomic and demographic indicators and household food waste and the potential impact of an external intervention on food waste.