Insurance Demand Over Varying Coverage Levels : Experimental Evidence from China

Low demand for crop insurance, even when subsidized at highly favorable rates, remains a challenge for policymakers in developing countries attempting to create insurance-based farm safety nets. Evidence from a series of surveys and experiments with 477 vegetable farmers in China reveals several anomalies in farmers’ demand for crop insurance as well as deviations from predictions under both expected utility theory and cumulative prospect theory. Farmers are willing to pay higher price for neutral-frame risk protection tool than for an insurance-frame equivalent. Moreover, they tend to be more likely to purchase low-coverage than high-coverage insurance, even when high coverage provides greater subsidized value. Among risk- and loss-averse farmers, who theoretically should be more interested in adopting risk protection tools, we find less willingness to purchase high-coverage level insurance