AES Annual Conference 2025: Anna Massfeller wins "Best PhD Presentation Award" AES Annual Conference 2025: Anna Massfeller wins "Best PhD Presentation Award"

At the 99th AES Annual Conference in Bordeaux, Anna Massfeller (Data Science in Agricultural Economics group) won the best PhD presentation for the contribution “Algorithm aversion in farmers’ intention to use decision support tools in crop management”. Together with Daniel Hermann (ILR), Alexa Leyens (ILR), and Hugo Storm (ILR), Anna Massfeller investigated how far farmers prefer crop management advice from humans over that from artificial intelligence-based algorithms. Based on an experiment with German crop farmers, the results show that AI tools would need to perform (much) better and/ or be (much) cheaper in order to be perceived as an alternative to human advice. AI is becoming an increasingly important aspect of farmers’ daily life and has great potential to give precise recommendations for efficient farming. This study is one of the first to investigate farmers’ behaviour towards AI.