Farmers’ Adoption of Sustainable Agricultural Practices: A Behavioral Economic Perspective

This thesis develops a behavioral-economic understanding of farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultural practices by (1) mapping how researchers elicit farmers’ subjective probabilities, (2) experimentally comparing belief-elicitation methods across populations, and (3) testing farmers’ preferences for alternative payment schemes to promote carbon-focussed practices. Chapter 1 presents a PRISMA-based systematic review of belief-elicitation in agricultural contexts, documenting methodological heterogeneity (digital and incentive-compatible approaches in high-income settings versus simplified, face-to-face methods where access and numeracy are constrained) and highlighting gaps in validation and external comparability. Chapter 2 reports an experiment that compares three elicitation techniques, namley the frequency method, the interval method, and quadratic scoring rule, using samples of farmers, experts and agricultural students to elicit probability distributions for methane-reduction outcomes from dietary changes. We find broad agreement across methods and participant groups, suggesting that less complex, more field-friendly techniques can produce reliable subjective distributions. Chapter 3 presents a lab-in-the-field experiment on farmers’ willingness to accept action-based (ABP), result-based (RBP), and hybrid (HP) payment schemes to incentivize adoption of an enteric-methane mitigation practice (essential oils in bovine diets). Farmers systematically prefer action-based schemes to results-based or hybrid alternatives, are indifferent between RBP tied to an Agri-Environment-Climate Scheme and an RBP tied to a voluntary carbon market, and respond differently to hybrid designs depending on institutional framing. Together, the three chapters offer methodological guidance for eliciting agricultural beliefs, evidence on the behavioral foundations of policy responsiveness, an implications for designing incentive instruments, emphasizing simplicity, context sensitivity, and the need to align measurement and policy design to farmers’ preferences.