Altruism, moral hazard, and sharecropping

The paper provides a new explanation for the emergence of sharecropping in agriculture. Under the principal-agent moral hazard framework, the choice of the agrarian land lease contracts is discussed from the perspective of behavioural economics. The analyses show that the landlord and the tenant's behaviour patterns play an important role during the course of the contractual choice. Specifically, the combination of altruism and moral hazard can lead to sharecropping, which gives an explanation greatly different from the existing theoretical literature.