Weather-index insurances are innovative risk management instruments that - compared to conventional insurances - cause low administration and regulation costs and are not accompanied by moral hazard or adverse selection problems. Despite these advantages, farmers make little use of weather-index insurances as yet. With this in mind, the present study focuses on the question if bounded rationality provides an explanation for the missing willingness to adopt this type of insurance. For lack of a natural experiment, an “extralaboratory experiment” is carried out in the form of a multi-period, single-person business simulation game with students of agricultural sciences. Two major questions are to be answered: first, does the demand for weather-index insurances change if the subjects are not only informed about the total insurance premium but also about the loading? Second, does demand change in a framing where subjects are told that the (unchanged loading) is the result of a subsidized insurance offer? In the experiment, the explicit communication of the loading did not have a significant effect. However, demand increased in the subsidization framing. This indicates that government funding is per se considered as a quality signal and that subsidized actions are preferred without an individual analysis of their relative competitiveness.
