| 1. |
- Lagerkvist, Carl-Johan, et al.
(författare)
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Social incentives as nudges for agricultural knowledge diffusion and willingness to pay for certified seeds: Experimental evidence from Uganda
- 2023
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Ingår i: Food Policy. - 0306-9192 .- 1873-5657. ; 120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A transition from low-input subsistence farming in Sub-Saharan Africa will require the use of yield-increasing agricultural technologies. However, in developing countries, most farmers continue to rely heavily on pest-infested and disease-infected recycled seed from own or local sources leading to low yields. This study used a field experiment to examine the effect of a social incentive combined with goal setting on the diffusion of agricultural knowledge and uptake of quality certified seed by farmers. We relaxed the seed access and information/knowledge constraints by introducing improved varieties of sweetpotato in the study villages and providing training to carefully selected progressive farmers who were then linked to co-villagers. We find that social incentives combined with goal setting reduced the likelihood of the trained progressive farmers reaching out to co-villagers to share information and discuss farming. Further, social incentive combined with goal setting had no significant effect on knowledge and experimentation by progressive farmers, and on willingness to pay for improved seed – as elicited through auctions, our proxy for experimentation, by co-villagers. These findings suggest that the combination of goal setting and public recognition acted to crowd-out diffusion effort. We conclude that social incentive combined with goal setting by established progressive farmers already enjoying a certain degree of public recognition is not sufficient to induce effort in learning and experimentation with agricultural innovations. These results have implications for design of policy and extension services to promote adoption of agricultural technologies with proven food and nutrition security benefits in developing countries.
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| 2. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Actors and their roles for improving resilience of farming systems in Europe
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Rural Studies. - : Elsevier BV. - 0743-0167 .- 1873-1392. ; 98, s. 134-146
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Finding pathways to enhance the resilience of farming systems (FSs) in Europe is key, given the increasing challenges threatening them. FSs are complex socio-ecological systems in which social and ecological components are strongly linked. Social actors have the capacity to shape the FSs’ resilience, but there is a knowledge gap about how they can best do it. The aim of this paper is to analyse the roles played by the actors in FSs when dealing with challenges and assess how these roles may contribute to the resilience attributes (conditions that enable resilience) and resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability, and transformability). To this end, ten focus groups have been conducted across FSs in Europe. Results suggest that each actor in the FSs can shape and strengthen different resilience attributes which in turn result in combinations of resilience capacities that are specific to the FS. Thus, enabling resilience is best accomplished with actors taking different roles and jointly configuring the most adequate combination of capacities, which differs across FSs. This paper provides a set of resilience-enabling roles that delineate the pathways to make FSs more resilient. The diversity of actors and resilience-enabling pathways require flexible, coordinated and comprehensive policies that encompass the complexity of the socio-ecological systems.
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| 3. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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An experiment on the link between risk preferencesand the willingness to become a farmer
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. ; 2, s. 686-702
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigates the link between risk preferences of agricultural students and their willingness to become a farmer. We conducted an incentivized experiment with 577 students of an agricultural university in Indonesia. Discriminating between alternative theories of decision‐ making under risk, we find that students' risk preferences behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory, but risk preferences are not predictive of students' willingness to become a farmer. Framing the experimental lottery task in either an agricultural or a general entrepreneurship context does not alter the predictive power for the willingness to become a farmer. Our results contribute to the debates on risk and farm generational renewal, as well as the (lack of) parallelism in behavioral field experiments.
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| 4. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Information processing in stated preference surveys A case study on urban gardens
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. - : Elsevier BV. - 0095-0696 .- 1096-0449. ; 119
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- For valid preference elicitation, stated preference surveys must provide information on the good to be valued, and respondents must process and recall the information. Previous studies show that the amount and type of information can affect stated preferences and the validity of value estimates, but how respondents process this information has been less researched. Some studies find correlations between preferences and respondent engagement with the information, but our study is the first to randomly and exogenously manipulate factors of engagement in a stated preference survey. Drawing on stated preference guidance and psychological concepts, we estimate the effect of quiz questions (asking about the content of the information) and self -reference questions (asking how the information personally relates to the respondent) on (i) engagement, (ii) information recall, and (iii) stated preferences in a discrete choice experiment survey valuing the ecosystem services of urban gardens in the German cities of Berlin and Stuttgart. Our results indicate that respondents spend more time on the information page when confronted with quiz rather than self-reference questions. For both question types, we do not find effects on recall or stated preferences. The results suggest that questions which increase engagement offer no simple fix to enhance information processing. Thus, alternative ways of reinforcing engagement, comprehension, and information recall in stated preference surveys should be developed and applied.
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| 5. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Learning about German farmers’ willingness to cooperate from public goods games and expert predictions
- 2023
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Ingår i: Q open. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2633-9048. ; 3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is a growing interest in collective contracts to address agri-environmental policy goals at landscape scales. Yet, little is known about farmers’ general willingness to cooperate. We developed four treatments of a linear public goods game to investigate farmers’ willingness to cooperate: (1) heterogeneous endowments, (2) leading-by-example, (3) social norms, and (4) pinpointing the socially optimal solution. Based on a sample of 358 German farmers, we find that contributions reach more than twothirds of the initial endowment across different treatments on average. Nudging the socially optimal solution is the most effective treatment. In addition to the experiment, we elicited incentivized predictions on experimental outcomes from 212 experts. Expert beliefs on treatment effects appear to be calibrated on laboratory studies, highlighting the need to conduct, communicate, and discuss experimental studies outside the laboratory. Young female academics with an Economics background most accurately predict farmers’ behaviour in the experiment.
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| 6. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Please keep ordering! A natural field experiment assessing a carbon label introduction
- 2023
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Ingår i: Food Policy. - 0306-9192 .- 1873-5657. ; 120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We conduct a natural field experiment investigating the efficacy of environmental information provision while considering its relationships with individual consumers’ habitual behaviour. A carbon label was introduced to the lowest-emission dish for each food category on the menu of a full-service restaurant; its efficacy was assessed by distinguishing its immediate impact on orders placed by the restaurant’s occasional and regular customers as well as the impact over time for repeated orders. We collected 1,737 customer orders – of which 1,200 were placed by 99 regular customers – taking advantage of an electronic ordering system that identified customers through a unique number. Independently of customer type, we find no immediate effect of the carbon label after its introduction. However, the probability of ordering an environmentally friendly dish increases significantly with repeated exposure and additional orders, albeit with a progressively diminishing effect. We discuss the importance of the repetition effect when assessing a new label, including implications for research and policy.
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| 7. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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The p-Value Debate and Statistical (Mal)practice – Implications for the Agricultural and Food Economics Community
- 2023
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Ingår i: German journal of agricultural economics. - : Deutscher Fachverlag GmbH. - 2191-4028. ; 72, s. 47-67
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A vivid debate is ongoing in the scientific community about statistical malpractice and the related publication bias. No general consensus exists on the consequences and this is reflected in heterogeneous rules defined by scientific journals on the use and reporting of statistical inference. This paper aims at providing an overview on the debate, discussing how it is perceived by the agricultural economics community, and deriving implications for our roles as researchers, contributors to the scientific publication process, and teachers. Following a ‘Mixed Methods Review’, we start by summarizing the current state of the p-value debate in the context of the replication crisis and commonly applied statistical practices in our community. This is followed by motivation, design, results and discussion of an explorative and descriptive survey on statistical knowledge and practice among the researchers in the agricultural economics community in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Instead of providing specific guidelines or rules, we derive implications for our roles in the scientific process to support a needed long-term cultural change regarding empirical scientific practices. Acceptance of scientific work should largely be based on the theoretical and methodological rigor and where the perceived relevance arises from the questions asked, the methodology employed, and the data used but not from the results generated. Revised and clear journal guidelines, the creation of resources for teaching and research, and public recognition of good practice are suggested measures to move forward.
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| 8. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Unequal Treatment in the Rental Housing Markets of Four Chinese Megacities
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Housing Economics. - 1051-1377 .- 1096-0791. ; 61
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Unequal treatment of tenants in housing markets can create significant economic and social costs. Yet, it has attracted limited attention outside the Western world. In an online correspondence study based on 1,167 email applications to landlords at a major Chinese real estate website, we investigate whether there is unequal treatment in rental housing markets in the four megacities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We find that applications with Uighur-sounding names are approximately seven percentage points less likely to receive a response from landlords and 9.6 percentage points less likely to be offered a showing compared to applications with Han Chinese names. Additional information on white-collar work or a long-term residence perspective in the city does not eliminate differences in landlords’ responses to names, therewith rejecting the idea of statistical discrimination on income or residence permits. We discuss possible extensions of the experimental design and conclude that the unequal treatment of different ethnic groups may pose an important future challenge to housing market regulation in urban China.
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| 9. |
- Rommel, Jens
(författare)
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Willing or complying? The delicate interplay between voluntary and mandatory interventions to promote farmers' environmental behavior
- 2023
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Ingår i: Food Policy. - 0306-9192 .- 1873-5657. ; 120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agri-environmental policies generally build around two complementary approaches: mandatory requirements and (compensated) voluntary measures. One of the challenges of the future EU Common Agricultural Policy is precisely to find the right balance between these two types of interventions. We conducted an experiment with farmers in three EU Member States to assess the impact of (1) increasing mandatory contributions to the environment, and of (2) decreasing unconditional income support. We also assess the effect of two key behavioural factors: environmental concern and trait reactance. Results show that both interventions reduce voluntary contributions to the environment, but the reduction is higher when mandatory contributions increase than when income decreases.. However, when mandatory contribution increases substantially, this more than offsets the reduction of voluntary contributions, leading to higher total contributions.
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