Linking small farmers to global markets through contract farming has become an important policy recommendation aiming to increase farmers’ income and foster rural development. Nevertheless, some of the arrangements involving small farmers have been reported to loose participants or collapse...

Contracts may be subject to strategic default, particularly if public enforcement institutions are weak. In a lab experiment, we study behavior in a contract farming game without third-party enforcement but with an external spot market as outside option. Two players, farmer and company, may...

Contract flexibility can be expedient for economic exchange in environments with high ambiguity and risk, but may also encourage opportunistic behavior. We run a modified investment game, including the choice between two different contract designs and asymmetric information about the realized...

Gender equity in the creation and enforcement of social norms is important not only as a normative principle but it can also support long term economic growth. Yet in most societies, coercive power is in the hands of men. We investigate whether this form of segregation is due to gender...

Gender equity in the creation and enforcement of social norms is important not only as a normative principle but it can also support long term economic growth. Yet in most societies, coercive power is in the hands of men. We investigate whether this form of segregation is due to inherent gender...

This paper investigates the trade-off between conservation and equity considerations in the use of payments for environmental services (PES) that implicitly incorporate different distributive justice principles. Using a public good experiment with heterogeneous participants, we compare the...

In the last decades global food value chains have seen the need for increasing vertical coordination in order to secure quality standards. A prominent way to govern the relationships between farmers and agri-business firms are farming contracts. We study the role of trust, risk and time...

Although there is a lot of evidence for the positive welfare effects of contract farming, it is not clear how to integrate farmers into contracts and how to maintain stable long-term-relationships between farmers and agri-business firms. While Contract Farming is a formal institutional...