| Article ID: | iaor20023618 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 83 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 993 |
| End Page Number: | 1009 |
| Publication Date: | Nov 2001 |
| Journal: | American Journal of Agricultural Economics |
| Authors: | Pennings J.M.E., Garcia P. |
| Keywords: | risk |
In applied agricultural economic research various risk-attitude elicitation techniques are used. Here, we investigate whether risk-attitude measures rooted in the expected utility framework are related to measures rooted in the multi-item scale framework. Using a second-order factor analytical model, and data obtained from personal computer-guided interviews with 373 farmers, we investigate whether the common variance among the (latent) risk-attitude measures can be accounted for by a global risk-attitude construct. We find that different risk-attitude measures are related, and that the global risk-attitude construct is significantly related to farmers' intention to use futures contracts. Our research suggests that farmers' risk attitude is a higher-order characteristic that cannot be effectively extracted by a single measure.