The effect of animal health compensation on ‘positive’ behaviours towards exotic disease reporting and implementing biosecurity: A review, a synthesis and a research agenda

Farmers’ willingness to invest in livestock disease control: the case of voluntary vaccination against bluetongue

“…Authors in the field of economics of animal health have suggested to go a step further and complement economic theory with insights from behavioural sciences (Edwards- Jones, 2006;Barnes et al, 2015;Gilbert and Rushton, 2016). Contextual factors that can be considered as key determinants of the willingness to invest in disease control are the experiential consequences of decisions Gethmann et al, 2015), in the economic literature known as non-use or passive values or nonpecuniary benefits (e.g.…”

“…The farmer's decision-making process is modelled as a "black box", which does not consider how preferences are formed and choices are made (Ben-Akiva et al, 1999; and are limited in their ability to account for process and context in decision making, failing to account for heterogeneity in decision making among farmers. If the willingness to invest in vaccination is also driven by intrinsic and social motives, this could imply that a mix of policy instruments, rather than simply financial compensation, is needed to make voluntary approaches more effective (Barnes et al, 2015;Ochieng' and Hobbs, 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, it is important to account for specific perceptions about disease risk, about the safety and effectiveness of applied measures and about the trust and confidence in the disease control approach chosen by animal health authorities (e.g. Several authors in the domain of economics of animal health have suggested complementing economic theory with insights from behavioural sciences to improve the understanding of livestock disease control decisions, to identify ways of motivating farmers to comply with voluntary approaches (Barnes et al, 2015;Gilbert and Rushton, 2016). It would be useful to develop and test a utility model representation of farmers' behaviour that allows for heterogeneity in the motives to invest in disease control, before further studying the dynamic interactions between farmers' collective behaviour and disease epidemiology.…”

“…As different authors in the field of economics of animal health have noticed (Rich and Perry, 2011;Barnes et al, 2015;Gilbert and Rushton, 2016), a body of economic literature that studied the effects of the abovementioned dynamic interplay used stylised economic models, mostly without epidemiological input, based on mainly information economics approaches, principal-agent theory and game theory to describe farmers' behaviour (Hennessy et al, 2005;Gramig et al, 2009;Horan et al, 2015;Wang and Hennessy, 2015). The models used are limited in their ability to account for process and context in decision making, while future conditions depend heavily on actions of other farmers (Nolan et al, 2009).…”

“…They do not want to be confronted with animal suffering but want to keep job satisfaction high from working with healthy animals. This suggests that a mix of policy instruments, rather than financial compensation only, is needed to make voluntary approaches effective (Barnes et al, 2015;Ochieng' and Hobbs, 2016). Interaction effects found between socialpsychological constructs and specific designs of policy instruments highlighted the importance of perceived trust and confidence in the vaccine safety and effectiveness and in the disease control strategy chosen by animal health authorities.…”