Do Heterogeneous Agricultural Factors Affect Farmland Contractual Choice?—Evidence from China

Abstract This paper introduces a game framework for farmland rent contract choice which incorporates the characteristic uncertainty about the quality of agricultural factors and heterogeneous agricultural attributes matching with rural land leasing contract and the dynamic contracting behavioral equilibrium. The game theoretic model shows that the farmland rent sharecropping is a Pareto optimum contract, that the different farmland use contractual arrangement will match with specific agricultural factors combination between farmland and labor, that sequential rational tenants will make the game transfer from Nash Equilibrium to Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium. Our field survey data of China between 2014 and 2015 is consistent with our theoretic hypothesis. The empirical results indicate that the tenant's age has significant negative effect on share contract, that social security, soil fertility and the number of plots have significant positive effect.