Swedish Farmers’ Acceptance of RCTs and Economic Experiments

Sammanfattning: A shift in the Common European Agriculture (CAP) towards agri-environmental payment schemes meant to incentivise the provision of environmental public goods calls for a diverse set of policy evaluation methods. Economic experiments such as RCTs can be efficient and cost-effective tools for improving and evaluating the effectiveness of these novel policies. However, the randomisation of benefits required in RCTs is controversial and might be ill-regarded among farmers. Despite their potential usefulness, the application of economic experiments remains limited in this context due to potentially low acceptability by farmers for being the subject of such studies. In an online survey with Swedish farmers, we explore the acceptability of two different hypothetical RCT scenarios and the general willingness to participate in an economic experiment using thought experiments. Our results suggest low acceptability of RCTs in which a group of farmers is excluded from receiving a payment. Moreover, we do not find support for an alternative RCT based on randomly varying the amount of payments in a scheme. Additionally, we find that farmers state a higher willingness to participate in economic experiments if aspects of fairness and transparency are highlighted while randomised or unequal payouts are rather ill-regarded. We also find some ambiguity between stated preferences and actual behaviour in regards to the willingness to participate in experimental studies after testing two modes of monetary incentivisation for participation in our study. We conclude that in the context of agricultural policy evaluation, RCTs should only be applied with great care and that future research should focus on finding ways to adapt RCTs in a way that would increase acceptability and that aspects of fairness, transparency, and a desire for equal payments should be considered in the recruitment for economic experiments.