In discussing the paradoxical violation of expected utility theory that now bears his name, Maurice Allais noted that people tend to “greatly value,” or overweight, outcomes that are certain. Digging deeper, the Principal Investigator draws on the more recent work of Andreoni and Sprenger on a Discontinuous Preference for Certainty and show that that impact of the rebate framing on willingness to pay for insurance is driven by individuals who exhibit a well defined discontinuous preference for certainty.

This paper presents a novel way to understand the low uptake of index insurances using the concept of discontinuity of preferences through a field experiment with cotton farmers in Burkina Faso.

This paper discusses an innovative index insurance contract the research team developed for Malian cotton producers, whose harvests are highly variable.

L’article présent résume le travail réalisé par Michael Carter, Rachid Laajaj et Andres Moya avec l’aide de Catherine Guirkinger et Ombeline De Bock, qui ont envisagé deux types d’indices : l’indice climatique et l’indice basé sur les rendements moyens.