In this dissertation I present novel findings that analyze the effects of insurances on the resilience to shocks and household's risk taking behavior. Moreover, the question is raised as to whether there could actually be something good about shocks, as they could trigger processes of social...

The discount rate is of great importance for all decisions in an intertemporal context, such as the decision of how much a society invests in environmental preservation, or the financial decisionmaking on the individual level. This study experimentally investigates the time preferences of...

Die Nutzung neuer Technologien in der Landwirtschaft spielt eine entscheidende Rolle, um die durch exponentielles Bevölkerungswachstum bedingten Herausforderungen zu bewältigen. Seit der Grünen Revolution der 1960er Jahre haben Forscher Probleme und Herausforderungen, welche mit der Nutzung...

Many economic decision situations of foresters and farmers are characterized by risk. Thereby, the individual risk attitude is of particular interest for understanding decision behaviour and, thus, is fundamental for valuable policy recommendations. The literature provides various methods to...

This article compares the use of risk-increasing and risk-reducing production inputs with the experimentally measured risk attitudes of farmers. For this purpose, the Just-Pope production function indicates production inputs’ influence on output risk and a Holt-Laury lottery is used to measure...

This thesis contributes to the understanding of the economic decision making of farmers. In five chapters, different experimental investigations of preferences and cognitive biases are presented. Various experimental measures of risk and time preference are applied to analyze farmers’...

The papers of the dissertation focus on decision making under uncertainty of farmers in developed and developing countries and apply experimental approaches in order to investigate farmersʾ risk attitude and investment behavior. The first paper experimentally examines the investment and...