Farmers' decisions to cultivate either a traditional or a commercial variety of quinoa. (CAPRi Project)

Abstract

The dataset includes data about a field experiment conducted in Peru in september 2012 (project CAPRi). The game was framed around farmers ‘decisions to cultivate either a traditional or a commercial variety of quinoa. The objective of the experiment was to analyze the effectiveness of two types of payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS) as well as of the effect of allowing farmers to communicate. In the game, the rewards were introduced to conserve a safe minimal population of traditional variety. Nine sessions were organized in different communities of the Province of Puno (close to lake Titicaca). The data were collected during a framed field experiment. Subjects participated in a game (experimental economics) where they were assigned 4 units of land and they had to decide whether to grow a traditional or a commercial variety of quinoa on each of these plots. Each participant was randomly assigned to a group of 4 players. At the end, they received money according to their decisions and the ones of their group peers. This was done to encourage them to act as in real-life situations where their decisions impact their income. They also received money for their participation. Each session was organized with 16 or 20 farm household participants (most of them producing quinoa) originating from the same community. In total, 176 farmers took part to the experiment. Finally a brief survey was completed, including questions about household demographics, farming, as well as organizational affiliation and social distance between participants. There are therefore three types of data in this dataset: 1) identification number (player's number, group's number, session's number, etc...) 2) the decisions of the players during the game (contrib, contrib_group, threshold, etc...) and 3) socio-demographic data from the survey (age, sex, ...)