Heterogeneous Behavioral Mechanisms Behind Farmers’ Compensation Expectations for Fertilizer Reduction: A TPB-Based Analysis Using Choice Experiment Data

The compensation a farmer requires to reduce fertilizer use reflects the behavioral factors behind the decision to participate. This study examines how they are associated with compensation expectations, and whether these associations differ across operator types, by integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior with a discrete choice experiment. Using survey data from 1066 rice farmers in Jiangsu Province, China, we recover each farmer’s willingness-to-accept (WTA) for fertilizer reduction as a money-metric proxy for the intention to participate, and model it as a function of behavioral attitude, social-institutional norm, and perceived behavioral control separately for conventional smallholders, specialized large-scale planters, and registered family farms. The pattern of associations differs across operator types. A favorable attitude is associated with a lower WTA only among smallholders, the social-institutional norm among smallholders and family farms, and perceived behavioral control among large-scale planters and family farms; the evidence for the attitude association among smallholders and for the norm association among family farms is relatively weaker. Each construct is thus associated with compensation expectations in a distinct subset of operator types, a structure that pooled estimation obscures. The findings suggest that differentiated policy could match attitudinal, capability-building, or institutional levers to the channel associated with each operator type, rather than relying on uniform payment increases.