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Abstract
Farmland is a principal production factor in agricultural production. Farmers have the opportunity to buy or to rent farmland. In this paper, we apply a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to analyze farmers’ individual buying and rental decisions for farmland. The net present value (NPV) is used as normative benchmark to evaluate farmers’ decisions in the experiment. Sociodemographic and business variables as well as farmers expectations about developments of farmland prices are used as covariates in the econometric analysis. Our results reveal that farmers have a higher willingness to buy than to rent farmland. Covariates as the farm size and the farmers risk attitude influence the farmers’ decisions in the DCE while no effect was observable for the individual expected purchase price change. Finally, we find that farmers act only in nearly the half of all decision in accordance with the NPV.