Financial institutions still neglect to address agricultural clients. The main reasons for that are their perception that farmers bear higher risks than non-farmers and that their loan products are inadequate to accommodate the needs of agricultural entrepreneurs. As a result, many farmers still...

In this study, we experimentally analyze the investment behavior of smallholder farmers in Uganda. We consider a problem of optimal stopping, stylizing an option to invest in a project. We ascertain whether, and to what extent, the real options approach and the classical investment theory can...

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...

Addressing interconnected social and environmental issues, including poverty, food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss, requires integrated solutions. Agroforestry is a sustainable land use approach with the potential to address multiple issues. This study examined the tree...

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...

The present dissertation is twofold and takes up several issues in two separate and independent articles. In chapter II, the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to aggregation biases in the underlying risk exposure of aggregated yield time series is presented. The...

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 emerging markets for high-value food products in developing countries, processing companies search for efficient ways to source raw material of consistent quality. One widely embraced approach is contract farming. But relatively little is known about the appropriate design of contracts,...