This Work Package is centred around the Economic Experiment Hub, a set of economic experiments that will test the utility of new measures and interventions and how these can be broadly implemented. The aim of these experiments is to identify effective interventions and incentives for influencing farmer behaviour.
The experiments will advance standard cost-benefit analysis of best fit practices to assess how behavioural factors affect the perception of these costs and benefits and influence the uptake of the measures examined. Economic experiments test human behaviours under controlled settings. They are particularly suited to identifying the behavioural factors underlying decision-making such as risk attitudes.
Economic experiments are increasingly applied to counter traditional approaches which assume farmers exclusively pursue profit maximisation. The Economic Experiment Hub will support the development of specific, tested interventions from case study Work Packages, and quantify the likely scale of costs and benefits of the approaches identified, including conditions for up-scaling to wider populations.
Here is a Research Brief introducing economic experimental approaches and how they can be used to better understand farmers’ behaviour.