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’...

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...

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...

This study compares risk attitudes of smallholder farmers elicited from two different lottery designs (i) with fixed payoffs and changing probabilities and (ii) with fixed probabilities and changing payoffs. We utilize a combination of experimental and household survey data collected from 332...