Consumer Inequality Aversion and Risk Preferences in Community Supported Agriculture

In community-supported agriculture (CSA), consumers face a tradeoff between (i.) the desire to support a CSA farmer and obtain environmentally-friendly goods and (ii.) the risk associated with a long-term commitment. We elicit inequality aversion and risk preferences of a sample of 162 French CSA consumers using incen-tivized field experiments. We find that CSA consumers are concerned about payoff inequalities. While we obtain evidence of advantageous inequality aversion toward CSA farmers, we also find disadvantageous inequality seeking. We find that CSA consumers are risk averse and loss averse and distort probabilities. We also observe that inequality and risk preferences in the loss domain might complement each other to strengthen consumers' support for CSA farmers.