Comparing Compliance Behaviour of Students and Farmers. An Extra‐laboratory Experiment in the Context of Agri‐environmental Nudges in Germany

Abstract

Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an ongoing debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.

Games and Fieldwork in Agriculture: A Systematic Review of the 21st Century in Economics and Social Science

“…More sophisticated tools have been developed, targeting extensionists and technicians to reach farmers [76]. Europe, Australia, and the USA showed a moderate, but increasing use of games, especially with the aid of innovative interfaces and technologies [7,17,22,45]. Furthermore, initial pilots and proposals also point to the possibility of using gamification-defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts-in agriculture through websites, apps, and SMS [77][78][79][80].…”

“…A study in the US finds that farmers' propensity to cooperate in a game depended on their degree of risk aversion and their expectation of others' behavior [21]. A study in Germany finds that a social nudge reduced farmers' free riding in a simulation game [22]. Likewise, a study in Latin America finds that individual incentives were more effective than collective incentives in promoting cooperation in an ecosystem services simulation [23].…”

Framed Experiments and Games in Agriculture: A Systematic Review of the 21st Century in Economics and Social Science

“…Europe, Australia, and the USA showed a more moderate, but increasing use, of similar games, particularly with the aid of innovative interfaces and technologies. Digital tools and electronic formats can expand the frequency and sample size as compared to games conducted in paper-based formats [14,19,31]. Overall, the rising interest in sustainability during the last twenty years [53] is reflected in the higher frequency of cooperation games that took place in strategic regions in terms of diversity, natural resources, and poverty and there are indications of the use of new technologies.…”

“…A study in the US finds that farmers' propensity to cooperate in a game depended on their degree of risk aversion and their expectation of others' behavior [18]. A study in Germany finds that a social nudge reduced farmers' freeriding in a simulation game [19]. Likewise, a study in Latin America finds that individual incentives were more effective than collective incentives in promoting Public good games (n = 1): An observational study of coffee farmers in Costa Rica [22] finds that farmers from different communities contributed less to a public goods game than farmers from the same community and that free-riding behavior was correlated with actual free-riding behavior.…”

How (un-)informative are experiments with students for other social groups? – A study of agricultural students and farmers

“…Other studies find that students tend to be less altruistic than non-students (Alatas et al 2009;Anderson et al 2013;Camerer 2015). Differences between subject pools could also be due to different decision heuristics resulting from differing job experience (Abbink and Rockenbach 2006;Levitt and List 2007;Peth and Mußhoff 2020). It is therefore an educated guess that all these differences might impact the choices made in an experiment.…”