Common Ground: Framing and the Potential to Mitigate Herbicide Resistance Using Collective Action

We collected data on the willingness of row-crop farmers in Argentina to coordinate actions to combat the impact of herbicide-resistant weeds using a framed field economic experiment that elicited farmers’ preferences in the gain and loss domains. This is a highly relevant case study because of the increasingly significant challenge that herbicide resistance poses worldwide as well as due to the increase in private and social costs associated with the market failure resulting from laissez faire. We find that the way the payoff from the decision is framed has a statistically significant impact on the probability that a randomly chosen individual coordinates, but such impact is not economically significant. However, we also find that the aggregation of responses disguises important underlying differences in how individuals responded to changes in the games’ framing. We discovered that a large share of farmers exhibited a type of behavior that could be hypothesized to be induced by time pressure, which has been found to cause reversal of (prospect theory) preferences. When considering the responses that do not show such a reversal —to make the case more favorable for framing — we find that the impact on the probability that a randomly chosen individual coordinates and on the maximum coordination threshold tend to be larger but are still of rather little economic significance. This finding suggests that highlighting the potential benefits of coordination in terms of reducing losses is unlikely to have a major impact to incentivize collective action against herbicide-resistant weeds.