Unraveling determinants of inferred and stated attribute nonattendance: Effects on farmers’ willingness to accept to join agri‐environmental schemes

Abstract

Attribute nonattendance (ANA) has received very little attention in the context of willingness to accept (WTA), although an increasing number of studies analyze the preferences of ecosystem service providers toward incentive‐based schemes. We add to the understanding of ANA behavior by analyzing stated and inferred ANA in a choice experiment investigating farmers’ WTA for participating in agri‐environmental schemes (AES) in southern Spain. We use mixed logit models, following Hess and Hensher for the inferred ANA approach. Evidence is found of ANA behavior for both stated and inferred approaches, with models accounting for ANA clearly outperforming those that do not account for it; however, we produce no conclusive results as to which ANA approach is best. WTA estimates are only moderately affected, which to some extent is consistent with the low level of non‐attendance found for the monetary attribute. Stated and inferred approaches show very similar WTA estimates. Additionally, we investigate sources of observed heterogeneity related to ANA behavior by using a sequence of bivariate probit models for each attribute. Overall, our results hint at a positive relationship between ease of scheme adoption and nonattendance to attributes. However, further research is still needed in this field.

A systematic review of attributes used in choice experiments for agri-environmental contracts

“…However, monitoring is costly, and the balance between non-compliance and monitoring is often ignored (Vedel et al, 2015). We observed that the monitoring attribute was insignificant in most of the studies indicating that it plays a minor role in farmers' choice of participating in an AES (Greiner, 2016;Rodríguez-Entrena et al, 2019;Villanueva et al, 2015bVillanueva et al, , 2015a. However, only Broch & Vedel (2012) and Vedel et al (2015) observed that monitoring had a significantly negative impact on respondents' utility and led to increased WTA.…”

“…Though 5 out of 34 reviewed studies used this attribute in their CE; however, 4 of these studies use the same set of choice attributes in their CE (Rodríguez-Entrena et al, 2019;Villanueva et al, 2015bVillanueva et al, , 2015a. According to Villanueva et al (2017, p6), this attribute was included in the CE to "explore a hypothetical future implementation of the EFA requisite of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 'green payment' in permanent crops such as olive groves".…”

Agri-environmental schemes for biodiversity and environmental protection: How we are not yet “hitting the right keys”

“…to still undertake environmental activities in unsubsidised land, although it should be noted that this land was adjacent to subsidised land and likely to have been benefited from this proximity. Having said that, Rodríguez-Entrena et al, (2019) have shown how payments are usually the contract feature that farmers focus most on.…”

Bringing the neighbors in: A choice experiment on the influence of coordination and social norms on farmers’ willingness to accept agro-environmental schemes across Europe

“…Also, given survey space constraints we gave priority to collecting farm and farmer characteristics and attitudes over attendance to attributes. Although ANA is a topic of increasing concern, the literature is still inconclusive about the impacts of non-attendance on welfare estimates (Kragt, 2013;Rodríguez et al, 2018) as it can reflect both heuristics or preferences (Heidenreich et al, 2018).…”