Citation

Jin J, He R, Gong H, Xu X, He C. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2017; 14(7): e14070713.

Affiliation

State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China. chunyanghe09@163.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph14070713

PMID

28665332

Abstract

This study measures farmers' risk attitudes in rural China using a survey instrument and a complementary experiment conducted in the field with the same sample of subjects. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks "in general", we found that the average response of our sample is slightly risk averse. Farmers' exogenous factors (age, gender, and height) and self-reported happiness have a significant impact on farmers' willingness to take risks. The experiment results show that approximately 44% of farmers in the study area are risk averse. We compare farmers' self-reported measures of risk preferences derived from the survey instrument to preferences elicited through the experimental task.

RESULTS show that answers to the general risk attitude question in the survey can predict farmers' behaviors in the experiment to a statistically significant degree. This paper can contribute to the empirical literature on comparing local farmers' risk attitudes across different risk preference measurement methods in the developing world.

Language: en

Keywords

China; farmer; risk experiment; risk preference; survey question