engleski

How Well Can Experts Predict Farmers’ Risk Preferences?

Risk is ubiquitous in agriculture and a core interest among agricultural economists. While farmers’ risk preferences are well studied, there is limited knowledge on the perspectives of stakeholders on farmers’ risk preferences. We address this gap by eliciting predictions from 561 experts, which allows us to understand how well these experts understand farmers’ risk preferences. First, we compare the accuracy of predictions by distinguishing different groups of experts. Second, we investigate whether the risk preferences of farmers from different production systems differ in terms of predictability for the experts. Third, we examine the effectiveness of expert predictions by randomly assigning experts to different incentives schemes. We find that an international group of researchers in experimental economics provide the most accurate predictions if compared to farm advisors and other experts from different countries as well as students of agriculture. Differences in predictions across the eight samples of farmers from different production systems are small. Incentivizing predictions by either a tournament scheme (the best prediction receives a reward) or high accuracy (randomly selected participants are paid depending on the quality of their prediction) do not strongly affect accuracy, but tournament schemes show somewhat smaller standard deviations.

Risk attitudes ; Expert predictions ; Multiple prices lists ; Meta-science ; Experimental economics

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