A structural estimation of French farmers’ risk preferences: an artefactual field experiment

We designed an artefactual field experiment involving real payments to elicit French farmers’ risk preferences. We test for two descriptions of farmers’ behaviour: expected utility and cumulative prospect theory and for preference stability across context (price risk and yield risk). We use multiple price lists where farmers make series of choices between two lotteries with varying probabilities and outcomes in the gain and loss domains. We estimate parameters describing farmers’ risk preferences derived from structural models. We find farmers are slightly risk averse in the expected utility framework. In the cumulative prospect theory frame, we find farmers display either loss aversion or probability weighting, tending to overweight small probabilities and to underweight high probabilities. We also estimate the reference point and find it not significantly different from zero. Cumulative prospect theory is a better description of farmers’ risk attitudes. We find risk preferences vary across context.