The first paper of this dissertation in Chapter II, “Insurance for Technology Adoption: An Experimental Evaluation of Schemes and Subsidies with Maize Farmers in Mexico”, analyzes experimentally how bundling the purchase of a risky technology, namely a higher yielding maize seed variety,...

In the past decades, a great interest has emerged in understanding the nature of people’s well-being beyond consumption opportunities. It is widely believed that happiness research based on self-reports on people’s satisfaction with life has made a significant contribution to this...

To date, studies dealing with the impact assessment of changing irrigation policies predominately rely on normative rational choice models that are subject to rather restrictive assumptions such as profit-maximizing behavior. However, there is increasing evidence that decision makers pursue...

Replaced with revised version of paper 5/26/11.

Weather derivatives are difficult to price due to the nontradability of weather and the absence of liquid secondary markets for these contracts. We use the concept of indifference pricing to develop a model for calculating the willingness to pay for weather insurance. Compared with other...

Investment decisions are not only characterised by irreversibility and uncertainty but also by flexibility with regard to the timing of the investment. This paper describes how stochastic simulation can be successfully integrated into a backward recursive programming approach in the context of...

Agent-based models (ABM) are used in many cases of policy assessment in agriculture. But the behavioural assumptions of these models consider farmers as myopic optimizing profit maximizers. In this contribution we compare the behaviour of myopic computer agents with the behaviour of students...

Agrarian structures are often characterized by some kind of economic inertia. It is particularly puzzling why unprofitable farms persist over time instead of being sold. In this paper we analyze the exit decision of farmers using the real options approach. The validity of the real options theory...