Despite the urgent need to preserve natural capital, little is known about the direct benefits people receive from it. Reliable benefit estimates are required to incorporate the complex values of natural capital in national capital accounting, cost-benefit analyses, project appraisal, and international policy agreements. The study employs a spatial-explicit choice experiment approach, which...
Farmers’ expectations regarding the future of their farm business play an important role in investment decisions, succession planning, and long-term farm sustainability. Understanding the association of behavioral factors like risk and time preferences with these expectations can contribute to designing agri-environmental policies. While these behavioral dimensions have been extensively...
The provision of marketable ecosystem services in agroecosystems is volatile, resulting in farmers' facing income risks. Those risks are likely to increase in the face of biodiversity loss and climate change. Various formal insurance mechanisms have been applied to mitigate this risk while other types of insurance have recently been discussed, such as social insurances.
Social insurances...
Motivation
Land tenure security is important for agricultural resilience, investment, and productivity, but in many countries, farmers often lack formal documentation and enforcement. While previous studies have explored institutional and economic determinants of land tenure security, little is known about the behavioral factors that can explain these perceptions. This study estimates the...
Invasive alien species (IAS) pose a significant threat to ecosystems, biodiversity, human well-being, and the economy. Effective IAS management requires balancing ecological, economic, and social dimensions. While biological control is often considered an environmentally friendly approach, it carries the risk of the control agent itself becoming invasive. Chemical insecticides, though...
Most studies on risk and time preferences focus on how individuals’, preferences change ex-post, following a traumatic or dramatic event such as civil war, conflict, or natural disasters. Extensive research has demonstrated that such catastrophic shocks significantly alter risk preferences. Another strand of literature explains how prolonged exposure to risks explains the heterogeneity in...
Motivation and Research Question
Trade-offs between ecosystem services (ES) are currently resolved at the expense of public goods. Multifunctional agriculture has the potential to regionally balance ES supply, but bears the risk of stifling indirect land-use changes abroad, leading to a loss of ES in other countries. We design a spatially explicit discrete choice experiment to estimate...
Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) that incentivize farmers to adopt environmentally friendly farming measures are a central element of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (Hasler et al., 2022; Pe'er et al., 2020). A collective approach allows farmers to coordinate measure implementation at the landscape level, which could increase their environmental effectiveness (Nguyen et...
Motivation and Research Question
Over the past two decades, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has progressively integrated sustainability goals, with the 2023-27 reform reinforcing this direction through voluntary eco-schemes that incentivize sustainable farming practices. Given the growing role of voluntary measures, understanding the factors influencing farmers' decision-making in...
Governments must find ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture to meet mid-century net zero ambitions. Changes in farming practice offer emission reduction potential as an important first step to meet ambitious climate targets. Additionally, farmers are increasingly expected to engage in reducing their GHG emissions through contractual arrangements with wholesale buyers....
Motivation and Research Question
Agricultural insurance plays a crucial role in helping farming systems manage climate-related risks. However, despite its potential, farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) remains low, especially for coverage against high-impact, low-probability weather shocks. To enhance WTP and insurance adoption, policymakers must understand how farmers' preferences vary across...
Crop diversity and spatial distribution are key contributors to an agricultural landscapes’ potential to provide multiple ecosystem services (Beillouin et al., 2021). Next to biodiversity and other public benefits, diverse crop rotations can help reduce pest pressure, harness pre-crop benefits and mitigate climate- and price-related risks for farmers. Yet, in Germany today, 64% of arable land...
The simultaneous desire for nature conservation and the ecosystem services it provides, alongside the challenge of land scarcity, presents an acute dilemma. One approach to addressing this challenge is to apply nature-inspired principles to agri-environmental policies, which can improve land-use efficiency.
In the Netherlands, the Waterschap De Dommel (2023) has introduced a novel policy...
The increasing magnitude and frequency of climate extremes pose major threats to farm productivity and food security. Adaptation trends, however, show gaps, remain incremental (e.g., irrigation) and insufficiently transformative (e.g., agroforestry). These trends could be explained by farmers’ risk behavior or low attitudes to changes in the production system. While past studies assume...
The transition to sustainable livestock systems is crucial for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhancing resilience in agricultural landscapes. Alternative feed sources, such as residue-based and insect-based feed alternatives, offer a viable solution within the circular bioeconomy framework by repurposing agricultural by-products to improve feed sustainability. However, farmer...
This study explores farmer preferences for public versus private agri-environmental contracts using a labelled Discrete Choice Experiment with 366 grassland farmers in Germany. Farmers prefer government-funded contracts, requiring higher compensation for privately financed alternatives. Practice-based payments are favoured over result-based payments, indicating risk aversion. Farmer identity...
The expansion of conservation tillage helps to improve soil health in countries affected by the soil erosion, such as the Republic of Moldova.There are several causes of erosion in Moldova, such as insufficient crop rotation (including a decrease in the area of legumes and fodder), deforestation, or improper tillage and fertiliser management. The area affected by erosion in Moldova is about...
Farmers’ participation in voluntary agri-environmental (AE) contracts for landscape-scale conservation is determined by various factors like the contract design and farm characteristics. However, recent evidence from agricultural and behavioural sciences has highlighted the importance of considering behavioural factors in farmers’ decision-making. This study examines the role of farmer...
Cocoa farmers in Ghana have not widely adoption of solar-powered irrigation, despite their recognized potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change on cocoa production. This study assesses farmers' preferences for climate and loan financing information for solar irrigation adoption. To study this, we conducted a discrete choice experiment with 631 cocoa farmers across regions of Ghana....
Result-based payment schemes (RBPS) are an alternative to business-as-usual agri-environmental climate action-based schemes. Key advantages are flexibility and autonomy for farmers, clearer payment-to-biodiversity link (European Commission, 2023). Germany was the first EU member state to apply RBPs (Oppermann & Gujer, 2003) counting currently with RBPs AECMs in several federal states (second...
In France, around one in five households has a connected water meter and the aim is to double this number by 2030 (TACTIS 2023), while over 95% of the French population already has a connected electricity meter. Despite their limitations (privacy concerns, time and maintenance, ...), smart meters can provide consumers with better information on resource consumption. Many studies show that...
Two challenges faced by many societies around the world are high levels of income inequality and nutritional outcomes, such as the prevalence of overweight, undernutrition, and micronutrient deficiency. Existing research suggests that policy trade-offs exist between the reduction of economic inequality and of adverse nutritional outcomes. However, while the formulation of targeted policies...
Public dissatisfaction with the distribution of consumer expenditure across the food supply chain—spanning input providers, farmers, processors, distributors, and retailers—is well-documented and indicates public discontent over perceived allocation inequalities. However, the psychological and ethical foundations of these perceptions remain underexplored. This study examines how individuals...
Sustainable nutrition plays a crucial role in achieving, both personal well-being and environmental health. However, students often face barriers in adopting alternative dietary habits due to cultural, social, economic and logistical challenges. This study explores the impact of a 1-Month Living Lab intervention on students’ nutrition behaviors, well-being, lifestyle and attitudes toward...
Identities receive considerable research attention as an explanatory factor for farmers’ willingness to engage in agri-environmental practices or schemes, and as a lever to increase this willingness. To date, research has mostly focused on identifying a small set of identities, such as productivists or conservationists. These identities are mostly descriptive snapshots of how farmers see...
Social norms have been identified as a strong predictor of behavior. In this experiment, we elicit social norms by adapting the Krupka & Weber (2013) design via an incentive-compatible coordination game. Respondents are presented with a scenario and potential actions related to agricultural practices in irrigation, pesticides and manure management. For each action, respondents are asked to...
This work introduces a foundation modeling strategy that integrates Item Response Theory (IRT) and the potential outcome (PO) framework to estimate the heterogeneous and average treatment effect (HTE and ATE, respectively) of randomly assigned interventions in experimental settings. This approach allows to automatically correct for measurement errors when eliciting individual latent...
The EU agri-environmental policies are increasingly pushing farmers toward more sustainable production practices. However, changing farmers’ behavior is challenging. Traditional regulatory approaches and subsidies alone often prove insufficient, leading to growing interest in behavioral interventions such as nudging to encourage sustainable agricultural practices. While research has...
Food loss and food waste put pressure on society, the environment and the economy. A variety of experimental interventions to reduce food loss and waste are conducted, as well as several review studies. However, it remains unclear which intervention is the most effective and what characteristics contribute to this. As there is an urgent need to reduce food loss and waste, it is important to...
Traditional economic models assume stable preferences, but growing literature suggests that exposure to dramatic shocks affects economic preferences. In regions where irrigation water availability is unpredictable, farmers frequently adjust their risk-taking and intertemporal choices. Despite extensive research on climate shocks, the effects of recurring irrigation shortages and drought events...
China's consumption has become more carbon-intensive in recent decades, making it the world’s largest CO2 emitter. However, with China aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060, a key question remains: How can a low-carbon lifestyle transformation be achieved? In present-day China, urban individuals under the age of 35 have the highest average carbon footprints and are strongly influenced by social...
Motivation and Research Question
There is ongoing debate about the optimal labeling strategy for introducing NGTs to the market. This study addresses this gap by investigating how different labeling scenarios affect consumer acceptance of NGTs, using a between-subjects experiment. We compare process-based labeling (describing production methods) and product-based labeling (highlighting...
The Income Stabilisation Tool (IST) was introduced in the 2014 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a mutual fund to compensate farmers for income losses due to price risk, distinguishing it from other mutual funds that primarily cover production losses. However, IST participation remains low across the EU member states. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the...
Motivation and Research Questions
Intensive meat production drives substantial public health impacts, making One Health (the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health) a pertinent paradigm for interventions. Correspondingly, sustainable food transitions focus on changing husbandry practices of animals in the food value chain in concert with dietary changes on the consumer...
Economic experiments are commonly used to study the behaviour of economic actors and generate policy insights (Levitt & List, 2009). A key concern in these experiments is incentive compatibility, ensuring that participants make decisions based on their true preferences, allowing researchers to derive valid conclusions on real-world behaviour. In many experiments, incentive compatibility is...
Setting the achievement of environmental objectives, instead of the adoption of specific management practices, as a contractual requirements of agri-environment payment schemes such as agri-environmental and climate schemes (AECS) in Europe, has been proposed as solution to improve their effectiveness (Wuepper and Huber 2021). Farmers’ participation in these payment schemes being voluntary,...
There is growing concern about the validity and transparency of research results in Economics and other social sciences. While development economists have quickly adopted the idea of pre-registration for randomized controlled trials to address one part of the problem, the validity and credibility of stated preferences methods remain contested. Critics claim that stated preferences studies fail...
An often overlooked negative externality of aquaculture relates to the impact of fish escapees on wild populations. Following an escape, fish bought as wild could de facto be an escapee. This paper investigates how this risk affects consumer welfare testing the presence of preferences reflecting prospect theory and endowment effects.
We implement a pre-registered between subject experiment...
Economic experiments are increasingly used for the ex-ante evaluation of agri-environmental policies. Such experiments typically rely on one of three subject pools: standard subject pool students, agricultural students, or farmers. While experiments with farmers are often considered more relevant for policymaking due to their higher external validity, the shift from students to agricultural...
