In general, rural producers manage their properties according to their own experience, a result of factors related to producer characteristics, producer preferences for available management instruments, and behavioral reasons. The current study seeks to both verify the existence of overconfidence regarding prices among a group of coffee producers, and to characterize coffee producers according to these attributes. Based on interviews with 244 coffee growers, the results highlight the existence of a group of 95 producers (38.9% of the sample) who exhibited overconfidence when evaluating the historic price variation in seasonal and offseason crops. When considering only seasonal crop prices, our study found overconfidence among 116 coffee producers (47.5% of the sample). Using factorial analysis and the cluster method, we found that the producers who claim that coffee markets are not risky, who possess a high risk propensity, and who have little knowledge of derivatives, tend to be overconfident regarding price.
overconfidence; coffee; management; prices
