An important class of investment decisions is characterized by unrecoverable sunk costs, resolution of uncertainty through time, and the ability to invest in the future as an alternative to investing today. The options model provides guidance in such settings, including an investment decision...

Der Aufsatz versucht einen Erklärungsbeitrag für das Wechselverhalten von Landwirten zwischen konventionellem und ökologischem Landbau zu leisten. Ausgehend von der Feststellung, dass die Umstellung auf ökologischen Landbau mit versunkenen Kosten verbunden ist und die Rückflüsse daraus...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

The goal of this article is to assess the optimal choices of a smallholder quinoa farmer in the Puno region of Peru, in terms of his decision if and when to undertake certain investments that are expected to increase quinoa yield and crop resistance to harsh weather conditions, such as frost. We...

A farmer’s uncertainty preferences can play a large role in how he makes production decisions on the farm. We attempt to understand how farmers’ household characteristics as well as past harvest shocks affect uncertainty preferences of maize farmers in southern Mexico. By using a series of...

Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries. Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs. Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season...

Ambiguity aversion in dynamic models is motivated by the presence of unknown time-varying features, which agents do not understand and cannot theorize about. We analyze the consequences of this assumption for economic agents and model builders, who typically need to estimate a model, e.g., to...

The ecological rationality of heuristics has been extensively investigated in the domain of individual decision making. In strategic decision making, however, the focus has been on repeated games, and there is a lack of research on 1-shot games, where opponents and the game itself can vary from...