Michigan has had unusually wet planting conditions in 2011, leading to substantial acreage that has not been planted at this late date. Farmers who purchased crop insurance have many options available to them. This paper addresses the major crop insurance decisions that farmers will face during...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

This article was stimulated by a 1997 American Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting preconference designed by Batie and Ervin. The authors felt that there was considerable interest and activity in business-led environmental management (also caLLed corporate environmental...

To many people, futures trading is a little understood and rather suspicious activity. The word most often associated with this trading is "speculation", the idea being that most of those involved in futures markets are gamblers in a high stakes game seeking profit at the expense of those...

Implicit in most applications of the expected utility (EU) model is the assumption that only the decision maker's own income matters. Moreover, studies that estimate risk preferences typically measure how individuals respond to changes in the level and likelihood of having their own income...

This is a revised copy of Staff Paper 2000-48.

Agriculture development efforts in the past have focused heavily on increasing aggregate output in less developed countries (LDC). In the last 2-3 decades, technology served as a key policy instrument used by developed countries to aid the less developed ones. However, such a policy had led to...

This review examines the psychological literature on risk perception in terms of van Ravenswaay's proposal of a broad-based definition of risk perception that includes the three concepts of chance, harm, and context. The review further investigates the manner in which psychological researchers...

The commodity-linked bond offers a potential means for producers of primary goods both to raise capital and to hedge against output price risk. Commodity bonds are distinguished from conventional bonds in that their return structure is denominated in quantities of the underlying commodity....