Voluntary Collective Action to Address Growing Agricultural Challenges in Two Countries: Experimental Insights and Commonalities

We conducted two framed field economic experiments with citrus farmers in Florida, United States and soybean farmers in Argentina to investigate their willingness to coordinate pest and weed management efforts. Despite the contrast between these two agricultural contexts, we find striking behavioral commonalities. In both countries, farmers display aversion to strategic uncertainty, rely heavily on beliefs about their neighbors' actions when deciding whether to participate, and systematically underestimate the probability of successful coordination even when opportunity costs are low. These common findings across such different settings suggest that the underlying mechanisms are not context‐specific but instead reflect more general features of decision‐making under strategic interdependence, lending support to the external validity of our findings. The results highlight key psychological and economic barriers to cooperation and offer policy‐relevant insights for designing interventions to enhance participation in voluntary area‐wide pest management programs. While voluntary coordination can enhance pest management effectiveness and be pareto‐optimal, the success of the collective action depends on overcoming farmers' reluctance to participate. The evidence that farmers systematically underestimate the probability of successful coordination even when opportunity costs are low highlights a key behavioral barrier that can lead to coordination failures. Interventions that mitigate strategic uncertainty and build trust among participants—such as targeted subsidies or technical assistance—could encourage participation among farmers who would otherwise be unwilling to engage in coordinated efforts. Beyond the immediate application to pest and weed resistance management, our findings contribute to a broader understanding of cooperative behavior among farmers in the presence of strategic uncertainty.