Farmers' acceptance of the income stabilisation tool: a discrete choice experiment application.

This article focuses on Croatian grapevine farmers' acceptance of the Income Stabilisation Tool (IST), a European Union (EU) risk management instrument designed to stabilise farm income by compensating income losses exceeding a defined threshold. Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey with 116 grape growers from Adriatic Croatia, the study finds that there is demand for IST, with farmers preferring schemes offering higher compensation, lower premiums, and income loss calculated over a 3-year average rather than an Olympic average. Behavioral factors were examined, revealing that farmers' subjective probabilities about expected income losses significantly influence their willingness to participate, whereas risk preferences and probability weighting elicited through lottery-based methods do not. The findings suggest that education and communication addressing farmers' perceptions of risk could enhance IST adoption, especially in regions with underdeveloped insurance markets and low cooperative farming structures.