Individual differences matter : personality traits and preferences in smallholders’ farm management

Abstract

multiple activities that might be spatially dispersed, and being able to sensibly adapt their resources (e.g., land, labour, and capital) to micro-variations in market circumstances and climate conditions (Nuthall, 2001;Rosenzweig, 1980). Operating a farm is thus in a way similar to owning a small business and farming requires entrepreneurial drive to some extent to meet challenges and deal with uncertainties (Allen & Lueck, 1998).The current thesis aims to provide more insights into the contribution of individual differences in personality traits and economic preferences to smallholders' economic decisions in agricultural production and farm management, using available data sets from China. It starts with an investigation Abstract: Land tenure security perceived by farmers is generally considered an important precondition for rural development. In this paper, we investigate the influence of psychological factors on farmers' perceived land tenure insecurity. In doing so, we disentangle the concept of perceived tenure insecurity into its cognitive and affective components and examine the relationship between them. We develop a recursive structural cognitive-affective model and present the results of applying structural equation modelling to a dataset collected in 2019 among 1359 rice farmers in three provinces in eastern China.We found that the cognitive component of perceived tenure insecurity shows an inverse "U-shape" relationship with the affective component, which can be interpreted as support for the ''risk-as-feeling'' proposition that feelings do not always correspond with perceived risk estimates in the case of land tenure security. Moreover, some personality traits (i.e., neuroticism and extraversion) were found to significantly affect farmers' perception of land tenure insecurity. We conclude that the perceived tenure security of rural residents may be increased if relevant laws and regulations would be communicated to farmers in such ways that personality heterogeneities are taken into account, paying special attention to farmers with more "vulnerable" traits. Although the research was done for rural China, the findings are also likely to be relevant for other developing countries where formal institution and informal regulations play intertwined roles in rural land tenure.