Agri-Environmental Policy and Moral Hazard under Output Price and Production Uncertainty

Several theoretical and empirical models have been developed to examine how risk aversion affects compliance with agri-environmental schemes under asymmetric information and uncertainty. However, none has examined the case where the level of compliance is a continuous variable and producers face simultaneous monitoring, output price and production uncertainty. Treating conservation effort as a continuous variable, we show that risk aversion can mitigate the moral hazard problem in most cases. However, if conservation effort has a risk-increasing impact on production the effect of risk aversion on compliance is ambiguous.