Abstract
It has often been suggested that risk and uncertainty have major influences on the rate of adoption of rural innovations (e.g. Lindner et al., 1982; Lindner, 1987; Weisensel and Schoney, 1989; Tsur et al., 1990; Leathers and Smale, 1992; Shapiro et al., 1992; Smale and Heisey, 1993; Feder and Umali, 1993). However, empirical evidence for or against this view has been relatively scarce and weak. This is primarily because very few of the many empirical studies of adoption of rural innovations have attempted to include risk and uncertainty as explanatory variables. Even the few existing attempts have tended to use crude proxy variables, probably because of the practical difficulty of obtaining high quality measures of the relevant variables, these being: farmers’ perceptions of the impacts of the innovation on the levels of risk they face; farmers’ uncertainty about the innovation; and, farmers’ attitudes to risk and uncertainty.
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Ghadim, A.K.A., Pannell, D.J. (2003). Risk Attitudes and Risk Perceptions of Crop Producers in Western Australia. In: Babcock, B.A., Fraser, R.W., Lekakis, J.N. (eds) Risk Management and the Environment: Agriculture in Perspective. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2915-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2915-4_8
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