In this paper we examine whether there is room for improvement in farm program decisions through the integration of formal mathematical optimisation into the planning process. Probing the potential for improvement, we investigate the cases of four Brandenburg cash crop farms over the last six...

It has often been noted that the "null-hypothesis-significance-testing" (NHST) framework is an inconsistent hybrid of Neyman-Pearson's "hypothesis testing" and Fisher's "significance testing" that almost inevitably causes misinterpretations. To facilitate a realistic assessment of the potential...

Regulatory policies often aim to steer the behaviour of economic agents by changing their framework conditions. Assessing the impact of such policies requires forecasts of how humans adapt to changes in their economic environment. A prerequisite for a meaningful policy impact analysis is a...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is widely used to compare the empirical performance of decision making units such as firms or public bodies. With a view to the recent boom of applications to a very wide range of different problems, this paper shows for which data and problem structures DEA...

Digitalization is progressing more and more and increasingly influencing business processes in companies. In this context, e-commerce plays an important role for the future development of rural areas. Nonetheless, there is so far no study which investigates the use of e-commerce for business...

Chemical plant protection and protection by genetic modification of crops are being discussed controversially by the public as well as by the agri-food industry itself. However, attitudes towards different methods of plant protection have so far only been studied by standard surveys, which may...

The question of how the increasing challenges of on-farm risk management - that e.g. result from the global climate change - could be met, has been an important subject of research for a long time. For instance, it has been discussed if index-based insurance are an alternative to classical...

Economic experiments have traditionally been conducted in laboratory settings. Since experimental conditions can be easily controlled and manipulated in the lab, high internal validity can be achieved. The external validity of lab experiments, however, is often poor due to the highly stylized...

Since the mid-nineties, agricultural economists discuss the suitability of "weather derivatives" as hedging instruments for volumetric risks in agriculture. Contrary to traditional insurance contracts, the payoffs of such derivatives are linked to weather indices (e.g. accumulated rainfall or...

Several studies applying the classical investment theory have shown that miscanthus (MSC) is an economically advantageous alternative to traditional agricultural land use. Nevertheless, only few farmers cultivate MSC. Therefore, it seems as if farmers do not act according to classical investment...