Gamification as an Approach To Enhance Comprehension in Risk Elicitation: Experimental Evidence From Smallholder Farmers

Abstract

Understanding risk attitudes is critical for agricultural development, as risk is ubiquitous in the lives of smallholder farmers. Accurate elicitation of risk attitudes is essential to analyze patterns and biases in decision-making. Ensuring comprehension and attention in risk elicitation tasks is particularly important, as inattentiveness generates noise rather than reliable results. Achieving this remains challenging, especially among smallholder farmers in the Global South, since many sophisticated risk elicitation methods require numerical skills that rural populations often lack due to limited education. To contribute to addressing this problem, we isolate the effects of illustration and gamification in risk elicitation tasks-two elements that may increase attention and engagement, potentially producing lower inconsistencies and more reliable results. We empirically test the Wheel-task, an elicitation method designed to be easy to understand and engaging, to motivate participation. The task follows a wheel-of-fortune model, where a spin determines the payout, while participants can always choose between spinning the wheel and a safe payout. We compare the Wheel-task results to the well-established Holt and Laury task (HL-task) in its original form, as well as with probabilities illustrated using the wheel. We collected the data among smallholder coffee farmers from rural Colombia and Peru and in a pilot phase among smallholder farmers from rural Cambodia. We find low levels of comprehension across all three tasks. More specifically, we find no substantial difference in comprehension or levels of risk aversion when illustrating the probabilities in the HL-task using a wheel. However, gamification affects levels of risk aversion, although these effects appear to be culturally dependent.