How Do Risk Attitudes Affect Fertilizer Input by Farm Households? Evidence from Maize Growers in Gansu, China

Reducing fertilizer usage from the perspective of farm household behavior is important for mitigating agricultural environmental pollution. However, existing studies often treat farmers as independent decision-makers in a risk-free setting and overlook the role of risk, particularly subjective risk, in fertilizer application decisions. Drawing on Arrow–Pratt’s theory of risk aversion, this paper develops a decision-making framework for fertilizer input under risk, examines the effect of risk attitudes on fertilizer input and its underlying mechanisms, and further investigates the heterogeneous impacts of risk attitude across different orientations of farmers’ economic benefit pursuits and intergenerational cohorts. The results indicate that: (1) more risk-averse farmers apply more fertilizer, and this finding remains robust after addressing endogeneity and conducting several robustness checks; (2) mediation analysis results indicate that both expected returns and path dependence have significant indirect effects in the association between risk attitude and farmers’ chemical fertilizer input; and (3) the positive effect of risk attitude on fertilizer input is more pronounced among farmers with a short-term orientation in their economic benefit pursuits and among the older-generation farmer groups. These findings offer a new theoretical perspective for understanding farmers’ fertilizer input decisions under risk and provide theoretical and practical implications for designing more effective fertilizer reduction policies that account for heterogeneous economic benefit orientations and intergenerational differences among farmers.