Risk attitudes of foresters, farmers and students : an experimental multimethod comparison

Many economic decision situations of foresters and farmers are characterized by risk. Thereby, the individual risk attitude is of particular interest for understanding decision behaviour and, thus, is fundamental for valuable policy recommendations. The literature provides various methods to measure risk attitude, however, their respective suitability has not been sufficiently tested. Furthermore, existing analyses focus mostly on students and the field of resource economics for farmers. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the risk attitude of foresters and how it compares to farmers and students' attitudes. Therefore, we investigate to what extent results are comparable across different methods and whether the risk attitude of foresters differs from that of farmers and forestry students. To analyse this issue, we conduct an incentivized online experiment using the Holt and Laury (HL) task, the Eckel and Grossman (EG) task and a self-assessment (SA) questionnaire. As a result, SA values do not correlate with the HL values, but the EG values correlate with the HL values across all groups, although, risk-aversion coefficients differ. According to the HL task and the EG task, we reveal higher risk aversion for foresters in comparison to farmers, while forestry students do not differ from foresters.