Technology Adoption When Risk Attitudes Matter: Evidence from Incentivized Field Experiments in Niger
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Fertilizer micro-dosing is a precision fertilizer application technique with the potential to improve
agricultural productivity and livelihoods in the semi- arid-tropics. Despite more than two decades
of disseminating the technology in Niger, micro-dosing adoption rates remain low with evidence
of dis-adoption. Since fertilizer is a risk increasing technology, this paper estimates the effects of
risk attitudes on fertilizer use and the practice of micro-dosing. We use different methods to elicit
measures of risk aversion and supplement those with measures of aversion to ambiguity and loss.
We find that incentivized measures of risk attitudes have better predictive power than general
measures based on hypothetical survey questions. Among the risk attitudes explored, risk aversion
tends to matter in the decision to use fertilizer and in the choice of an application technique when
fertilizer is used. This indicates that ex post programs like insurance could promote the use of
fertilizer and fertilizer micro-dosing among risk averse farmers.