RT Dissertation/Thesis T1 Investigating climate change perception and expectation formation for the advancement of agent-based models applied to agricultural adaptation assessment A1 Eisele,Marius WP 2019/09/09 AB To inform more realistic representations of farmer decision making in agent-based simulation models applied to agricultural adaptation assessment at the regional scale, the present thesis investigates three areas of central importance for judgments about farm-level reactions to climate change: (i) perception of changes in local weather conditions and expectations about their effects; (ii) reception of signals from the biophysical environment and their interpretation in terms of socially constructed understandings of climate change, farm-level risks, and perceived adaptation capacity; and (iii) the nature of expectation mechanisms involved in the formation of judgments about climatic changes. For this purpose, three types of empirical approaches were used: questionnaire-based surveys conducted with farmers from two study areas in Southwest Germany, the Central Swabian Jura and the Kraichgau; a questionnaire-based comparative study of farmer school students and pre-first-semester undergraduate university students enrolled in study programs related to agriculture without experience in farming and no study experience; and economic lab experiments conducted with farming practitioners (experienced farmers and farmer school students) and university students from agriculture-related study programs with several semesters of study experience. Based on these empirical findings, the following recommendations for the agent-based modeling software MPMAS are derived: (i) agent-specific levels of climate change awareness should be accounted for to reflect the effects of personal experiences with climate change outcomes, social norms and individual-specific learning patterns and coping behavior; (ii) the effects of incomplete information assessment and risk aversion should be reflected in the imputed selection mechanism for climate change response, i.e. for the choice of adaptation measures; and (iii) experimental results should be used to inform modeled expectation mechanisms of agents, currently implemented for judgments about future prices and yields. K1 Erwartungsbildung K1 Agentenbasierte Modellierung K1 Klimawandelwahrnehmung K1 Experimentalökonomischer Ansatz PP Hohenheim PB Kommunikations-, Informations- und Medienzentrum der Universität Hohenheim UL http://opus.uni-hohenheim.de/volltexte/2019/1655