The lack of adoption of new farming technologies despite known benefits is a well-documented phenomenon in development economics. In addition to a number of market constraints, risk aversion predominates the discussion of behavioral determinants of technology adoption. We hypothesize that...

We experimentally test for the effect of an additional alternative on the measured risk preferences of farmers in rural Peru. In our experiment, subjects revealed their risk was always dominated by one of the two existing gambles. We found that subjects chose this gamble nearly one quarter of...