The study, published in BMC Agriculture, surveyed 351 randomly selected smallholder farmers using an open-ended contingent valuation method, a technique designed to estimate what people would pay for goods and services that are not traded in conventional markets. Rather than presenting farmers with preset price ranges, which can anchor responses and inflate or distort valuations, the researchers asked respondents to freely state the maximum amount they would pay for each individual service. This methodological choice matters: because Malawi’s Department of Agricultural Extension Services has never established standard pricing for paid public extension, any close-ended survey would have struggled to identify unbiased reference prices. The resulting estimates therefore offer an unusually candid window into how farmers themselves value the advice they receive.

The pattern of demand that emerged is strikingly practical. Disease control topped the list, with 40.17 percent of farmers expressing willingness to pay, followed by crop husbandry at 23.37 percent and pest control at 22.79 percent. Livestock breeding, manure making and utilization, and livestock feed and feeding rounded out the most sought-after services. The researchers interpret this hierarchy as a reflection of farmers prioritizing support that delivers immediate, tangible benefits to productivity. With 75.5 percent of surveyed households cultivating plots of one acre or less, and 77.78 percent describing their farming as primarily subsistence-oriented, the emphasis on quick, affordable improvements in output makes economic sense. Services addressing acute threats to yield, such as pests and animal disease, command attention because losses can be catastrophic for households with no buffer.

Yet demand and valuation are not the same thing, and the study reveals a fascinating divergence between the two. The highest average willingness-to-pay amounts went not to the most demanded services but to those perceived as transformational investments. Farm mechanization led the list at an average of 9,730.77 Malawian kwacha, followed by livestock breeding at 7,065.85 kwacha and farm map production at 6,400 kwacha. At the time of the study, the exchange rate stood at roughly 1,735 kwacha to the US dollar, making these substantial sums for subsistence households. By contrast, high-demand services such as disease control and crop husbandry attracted only moderate average valuations between about 2,600 and 4,000 kwacha, suggesting farmers view them as routine or incremental rather than premium offerings.

The statistical analysis of what drives willingness to pay yielded equally revealing results. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression with robust standard errors, corrected for heteroscedasticity after a Breusch-Pagan/Cook-Weisberg test rejected constant variance, the researchers identified seven significant determinants. Male-headed households reported willingness to pay about 617 kwacha more than female-headed households, a disparity the authors link to gendered control over farm decision-making and financial resources in a country where both matrilineal and patrilineal systems shape access to productive assets. Married farmers showed significantly higher willingness to pay than single farmers, likely reflecting household stability and joint investment decisions. Each additional acre of land increased willingness to pay by 378.26 kwacha, while each additional household member reduced it by 237.23 kwacha, a negative effect the authors attribute to the resource constraints facing larger families.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns education. Farmers with only primary education expressed significantly higher willingness to pay than those with no formal schooling, yet secondary and tertiary education showed no significant effect. The authors suggest that basic literacy and numeracy enable farmers to appreciate the value of extension advice, but more advanced education may open alternative channels of agricultural knowledge, from digital platforms to private advisory services, reducing reliance on the public system. This echoes earlier findings from Ethiopia, where better-educated farmers gravitated toward mobile-based services. Equally notable was the strong premium that integrated crop-livestock farmers placed on extension: they were willing to pay significantly more than crop-only or livestock-only producers, presumably because mixed systems offer multiple synergies, such as feeding crop residues to animals and returning manure to the soil, that expert advice can help optimize while spreading risk across income sources.

The design preferences farmers expressed for a cost-sharing model are just as consequential as the amounts they would pay. Payment preferences split almost evenly between individual and collective approaches, but the channels of payment clustered around convenience and direct accountability: 45 percent preferred handing cash directly to agricultural extension workers and 40 percent favored mobile money transfers. Traditional banking, payments at extension planning area offices, and routing money through traditional authorities or government agents attracted minimal support, likely because farmers perceive such channels as bureaucratic and complex. The mobile money result is particularly significant in a country where mobile financial services have expanded rapidly, offering a ready-made infrastructure for collecting user fees at scale.

Delivery preferences were equally emphatic. Nearly half of farmers wanted individual face-to-face consultations, while another 38.7 percent preferred group-based sessions; radio, SMS, magazines, and television attracted only marginal interest, and email none at all. This preference for in-person interaction is reinforced by the study’s finding of a striking gap between physical access and actual service: although 64.95 percent of farmers live within 10 kilometers of an extension office, 68.95 percent received only one or no visits from an extension officer in the previous year. With 72.93 percent of farmers having only primary education, the limited capacity to engage with digital platforms makes direct, personalized interaction not merely a preference but a practical necessity. The data suggest that any cost-sharing system built around remote or digital delivery would miss the majority of its intended clientele.

One of the most sobering details in the study is that 61.54 percent of farmers were unaware of Malawi’s cost-sharing policy direction, despite the country’s 2000 policy framework, titled Agricultural Extension in the New Millennium, having explicitly endorsed pluralistic, demand-driven services under the principle that those who benefit pay. That farmers still expressed strong willingness to pay despite this awareness gap points, the authors argue, to a deeper intrinsic demand for relevant, responsive advisory services. The finding aligns closely with earlier Malawian research that reported an almost identical 86 percent support for participatory, demand-led extension. It also stands in sharp contrast to studies from elsewhere in Africa, including one from eastern Ethiopia where only 10.5 percent of farmers were willing to pay, underscoring how context-specific these dynamics are and why localized evidence is essential for policy design.

The policy implications are considerable. The authors recommend tiered pricing or targeted subsidies for services with high to moderate demand, gender-sensitive pricing and awareness campaigns to improve uptake among women-headed households, and continued free provision for less-valued services with broader community benefits, such as environmental management, HIV/AIDS awareness, and farmer organization development, which farmers appear to regard as public goods that should remain publicly funded. They also caution that the study’s cross-sectional design leaves room for further research into additional socio-economic and institutional factors, and that the actual costing of extension services in Malawi remains to be established. Still, the core message is clear: Malawi’s smallholder farmers are not passive recipients waiting for free advice. They are discerning customers who know which services they value, how they want to pay, and how they want to be reached, and any reform that ignores those preferences risks repeating the inefficiencies the cost-sharing model was designed to fix.

Subject of Research: Smallholder farmers' willingness to pay for cost-shared agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi

Article Title: Smallholder farmers’ willingness to pay for agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi: Case of Mzimba, Lilongwe, and Zomba districts

Article References: Jere, Z. M., Magombo, J. H., Chawinga, K., Mvula, W., Banda, S., Jere, M., Nkumba, S., Kamwambeni, S., & Nkhata, L. (2026). Smallholder farmers’ willingness to pay for agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi: Case of Mzimba, Lilongwe, and Zomba districts. BMC Agriculture, 2(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-025-00027-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-025-00027-5

Keywords: Malawi, smallholder farmers, agricultural extension, willingness to pay, cost-sharing, contingent valuation, agricultural economics, food security, mobile money, extension policy, sub-Saharan Africa, farm advisory services

Researchers led by I Wayan Koko Suryawan of Universitas Pertamina surveyed 640 residents of Jakarta, a megacity of more than ten million people whose rapid digital transformation has accelerated the replacement of laptops, personal computers, and smartphones. The team included end-users, electronics retailers, and representatives of recycling organizations, and supplemented the survey with semi-structured interviews involving government bodies, non-governmental organizations, and private companies. Their goal was to map how consumers weigh cost, convenience, environmental benefit, and data protection when deciding whether to participate in formal e-waste programs.

The study’s central concept is resilience: the capacity of consumers, manufacturers, and institutions to keep collection and recycling systems functioning as technology and policy conditions shift. The authors break consumer engagement into four behavioral attributes. Planning describes whether people organize device disposal on a schedule, ideally guided by brand recommendations. Interest captures motivation to join recycling and data-protection programs. Learning reflects the ability to absorb new disposal practices through education. Coping measures access to practical services, such as manufacturer-supported data erasure, that remove barriers to handing in a device.

To quantify these preferences, the team ran a choice experiment. An initial pool of 540 possible policy profiles, built from five attributes at multiple levels, was reduced to 25 statistically efficient scenarios using an orthogonal design, then grouped into choice sets of two alternatives plus a status quo option. Respondents were asked to pick their preferred program in each set, with payment levels ranging from zero to 50,000 Indonesian rupiah per item. The design was validated by a panel of eight experts, including an NGO officer, a scientist, two educators, and four government officials, and piloted with 50 participants in November 2023 before the main survey ran from December 2023 to March 2024.

The results, analyzed with Random Parameter Logit and Latent Class models, reveal a striking pattern: consumers want help, but not a takeover. Moderate brand guidance for scheduled disposal and secure data destruction carried a positive and statistically significant coefficient, with a marginal willingness to pay of roughly 17,799 rupiah per item. Fully brand-managed disposal, by contrast, was significantly negative. The same asymmetry appeared for education and coping. Gradual, brand-supported learning was the single most valued attribute at 37,835 rupiah per item, while intensive continuous education programs were rejected. Initial use of manufacturer data-handling services drew 26,057 rupiah, but comprehensive service packages were again viewed unfavorably.

The authors interpret this as a preference for incremental assistance that preserves consumer autonomy. Respondents appear to perceive fully centralized programs as complex, costly, or restrictive, and extensive interventions as burdensome relative to their actual needs. Price sensitivity also varied by group: the interaction analysis found that higher-income respondents earning more than 7.5 million rupiah per month, those with bachelor’s degrees, people who replace laptops in under two years, and those older than 39 were more responsive to program costs than the general sample.

The Latent Class Model sorted respondents into two segments. Class 1, about 80 percent of the sample, showed stable and consistent preferences favoring brand-guided disposal, participation in data-protection exchange programs, and sustainable purchasing habits. Its members tend to have higher incomes, higher education, and more frequent device replacement, and are generally younger than 39. Class 2, roughly 20 percent, produced statistically unstable estimates with standard errors far exceeding the coefficients, so the authors caution against reading precise preferences from it, though its existence signals a minority with divergent views on brand involvement.

From these results the team constructed three hypothetical engagement scenarios representing increasing levels of decoupling, the separation of economic activity from environmental harm. In the basic scenario, consumers follow brand-guided disposal routines and join data-protection exchanges, yielding an average willingness to pay of 2,751 rupiah per item. The intermediate scenario adds brand-led education at purchase and initial use of manufacturer data services, raising the figure to 6,177 rupiah. The advanced resilience scenario, combining planned disposal, active data-security participation, sustainable purchasing, and full use of brand-supported services, reaches 8,928 rupiah per item. The progression suggests consumers recognize and will pay for increasingly comprehensive systems.

The implications reach beyond Jakarta’s borders. Data security is a well-documented barrier to formal recycling worldwide, particularly for laptops and personal computers holding sensitive information, and the study indicates that reliable deletion services and transparent privacy protocols can convert hesitant owners into participants. For recyclers, more structured brand-supported collection would deliver predictable, higher-quality material flows and reduce the unsafe dismantling practices common in informal operations. Crucially, the authors stress that formal programs are meant to complement, not replace, Jakarta’s informal network, with buy-back schemes and partnerships that preserve the economic role of informal workers while improving traceability and treatment standards.

The authors also urge caution in generalizing. Jakarta’s density, logistics infrastructure, and high device consumption differ sharply from smaller Indonesian cities and rural regions, where informal collection dominates and formal services are sparse; brand-supported initiatives there would need adaptation through local partnerships and community-based awareness campaigns. Looking forward, they point to digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and distributed ledgers for tracking devices, and to policy instruments like tax benefits and subsidies, noting that evidence from the European Union shows stricter e-waste regulation can substantially lift recycling participation. As consumer attitudes and technology cycles continue to evolve, the study concludes, adaptive monitoring and sustained brand engagement will be essential to keeping e-waste systems resilient.

Subject of Research: Consumer willingness to pay for resilient, data-secure e-waste management in Jakarta

Article Title: Future directions and consumer engagement scenarios for data resilience in e-waste management in Jakarta

Article References: Suryawan, I. W. K., Sari, M. M., Rahman, A., Suhardono, S., & Lee, C.-H. (2026). Future directions and consumer engagement scenarios for data resilience in e-waste management in Jakarta. Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 34, Article 101288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clet.2026.101288

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: e-waste, Jakarta, consumer behavior, data privacy, recycling, choice experiment, willingness to pay, resilience, informal sector, decoupling, brand engagement, Indonesia

The study, led by Balázs Kertesz of the Doctoral School of Business and Management at the University of Debrecen, together with Klára Bíró of the Institute of Health Economics and Management and Péter Balogh of the Institute of Methodology and Business Digitalization, was designed to fill a stubborn evidence gap. Hungary’s public system has faced well-documented underfunding, leading to long waiting lists and constrained access to specialists. Those frictions have become the engine of private-sector growth, as households increasingly pay directly for consultations, diagnostics and elective procedures. Yet until now, policymakers have had little rigorous information about which attributes of private services actually matter to the general adult population, rather than to existing private clinic customers. Understanding those preferences matters for anyone planning service networks, setting prices, or designing policies aimed at narrowing regional inequalities in access.

Methodologically, the researchers deployed a two-stage approach that is considered state of the art in stated-preference research. Before constructing the main choice experiment, they conducted a best-worst scaling (BWS) exercise to identify which candidate attributes of private healthcare were most relevant to respondents. BWS asks participants to repeatedly identify the best and worst options in small sets of attributes, producing a ranking of relative importance that is less vulnerable to the scale distortions of simple rating scales. From this preparatory work, five attributes survived into the final experimental design: the cost of the service, the distance to the provider, the availability of appointments, the reputation of the provider, and the type of clinic or provider.

The main survey then confronted each of the 1,014 respondents with a series of realistic decision scenarios. In each of eight choice situations, participants saw three hypothetical private healthcare offers described by varying combinations of the five attributes, alongside a fourth option: to decline all of them and remain in public healthcare. This opt-out alternative is methodologically crucial. Because Hungarian adults can always default to the public system, a well-designed experiment must allow them to express that preference rather than forcing them to choose among private options they might reject in real life. Including a no-choice option anchors the experiment in the genuine decision architecture of Hungary’s dual system and prevents the overstatement of demand that plagues forced-choice designs.

The statistical engine behind the analysis was a conditional logit (CL) model, the workhorse specification for discrete choice data. Conditional logit assumes that the utility an individual derives from a given healthcare option is a linear function of its attributes plus a random error term, and that the probability of choosing any one option is proportional to its estimated utility relative to the full choice set. From the estimated coefficients, the team could compute both the relative importance of each attribute and—critically for health economics—willingness-to-pay (WTP) figures. WTP calculations translate abstract utility weights into monetary terms: they answer the question of how much more a patient would be willing to pay for, say, a provider located half as far away, or an appointment available a week sooner.

The results are unambiguous in their hierarchy. Provider distance emerged as the single most important attribute, accounting for 40.01% of the explained preference structure. Cost followed at 32.31%, and appointment availability took third place at 19.13%. Together, these three practical attributes dominated roughly nine-tenths of the preference weight in the model. Institutional reputation and provider type—the attributes often emphasized in private clinics’ own marketing, from glossy branding to physician celebrity—were far less influential. In other words, Hungarian patients are not primarily buying prestige when they enter the private market; they are buying proximity, affordability and speed. The willingness-to-pay estimates reinforce this picture, quantifying exactly how much shorter travel times and faster appointments are worth relative to each other and to price.

These findings carry a counterintuitive edge that helps explain the trajectory of Hungary’s private healthcare market. Many observers might assume that private care functions as a status good, with patients choosing flagship downtown clinics and renowned specialists. The data suggest something more mundane and, arguably, more consequential: demand behaves like a market for convenience. A private clinic that opens closer to where people live or work, prices its services within reach of median households, and offers appointments without long delays will capture preference share even if its reputation is unremarkable. Conversely, a prestigious institution located far from patients, or charging fees well beyond their comfort zone, leaves much of the market on the table—or sends it back to the public system entirely, where the no-choice option remains a real and frequently exercised alternative.

For policymakers, the study’s implications extend beyond marketing strategy into questions of equity and system design. Distance as the dominant attribute is a red flag for regional inequality: patients in smaller towns and rural areas face systematically longer travel to private providers, meaning the convenience premium of private care is distributed unevenly across the country. If accessibility, rather than quality perception, is what patients weigh most heavily, then the geography of private investment decisions will shape health access patterns for years to come. The findings can inform service-planning discussions about where new capacity should be located, how pricing structures affect uptake among lower-income groups, and how the public system’s waiting times—the very frictions that push patients private—might be reduced to rebalance the two sectors. The authors frame their results as input for exactly these policy conversations on access, affordability and regional disparities in Hungary’s mixed public-private healthcare system.

The research also exemplifies a broader methodological trend in health services research: the pairing of best-worst scaling with discrete choice experiments to build more realistic, behaviorally grounded preference models. By using BWS to prune the attribute set before the DCE, the researchers reduced cognitive burden on respondents and improved the interpretability of the final estimates. The inclusion of the public-care opt-out, the quota-representative sampling frame, and the translation of utilities into willingness-to-pay values together produce evidence that speaks directly to both economics and policy. The study received ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Debrecen and was conducted under the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with all participants providing informed consent. Open access funding was provided by the University of Debrecen, and the authors thank Dr. Péter Czine for verifying the analytical methods. As Hungary’s private healthcare sector continues to expand against the backdrop of public-sector strain, this experiment provides a rare quantitative answer to a deceptively simple question: what makes a Hungarian adult choose to pay for care? The answer—closer, cheaper, sooner—may disappoint brand strategists, but it should energize anyone committed to making healthcare genuinely accessible.

Subject of Research: Patient preferences for private healthcare services among the Hungarian adult population, measured with a discrete choice experiment

Article Title: Understanding patient preferences for private healthcare services among the general Hungarian adult population using discrete choice experiment

Article References: Kertesz, B., Bíró, K., & Balogh, P. (2026). Understanding patient preferences for private healthcare services among the general Hungarian adult population using discrete choice experiment. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00482-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00482-8

Keywords: discrete choice experiment, private healthcare, Hungary, patient preferences, willingness to pay, best-worst scaling, conditional logit, healthcare access, regional inequality, health policy, University of Debrecen, out-of-pocket spending