Learning Principal-Agent Contracts for Equitable Smallholder Carbon Farming under Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection
Agricultural soils are a major untapped carbon sink. Carbon farming is emerging as a promising practice for tapping this potential. Smallholder farmers, who dominate agriculture across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, are key to scaling climate mitigation via carbon farming. It is ironic that real-world carbon programs largely fail to reach them. We study this important gap through the lens of contract design. An aggregator offers a single pooled contract to a heterogeneous population of smallholder farmers who have private adoption costs (adverse selection) and exert unobserved effort (moral hazard), with agronomic outcomes evolving over multiple seasons. We formulate this evolving con...
| Authors | Rishi Bharadwaj, Yadati Narahari |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 17 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 September 2026 |
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