Exploring the Effect of Perceived Transaction Costs on Farmers’ Attitudes toward Participation in Agri-Environment-Climate Measures (AECMs)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The title is misleading as the content does not fit. You did not engage with the farmers on their entrepreneurial attitudes but asked questions on TCs and their experiences with admin processes around AECMs. You also state that  ‘this study intends to explore the level of transaction costs per- 121 ceived by farmers engaged in AECMs, as these costs have the potential to influence their 122 business decisions’. The title is hence misleading.

Line 9- it is not clear what you mean by – ‘conditioned by farmers’ decision to participate’. Do you mean influenced, determined,etc. Could you use a more definitive term?

Line 26- use of the term ‘revindication’ does not make much sense. Revindicate means to ‘to vindicate again, to claim a right, claim or title. The question is, was there a question or contestation of farmers as entrepreneurs? Would positioning or a similar term better suit what you want to say?

What does CAP stand for?

There are issues surrounding the overall research methodology. Likert style questionnaires including open ended questions? How can the research then be deemed qualitative? 30 questionnaire administration in different countries yields very little data set for work of this nature.

How were these farmers selected? What was the sampling frame? How many farmers from each of the countries? There is no information to determine the rigourness of this work.

Apart from reporting on your engagement with farmers, what other purposes does this paper serve? What are the suggestions to reduce the difficulties experienced by farmers regarding AECM that has been brought to light in this work? Are there any policy implications/suggestions?

Author Response

We would thank the anonymous reviewer for his comments and the appreciated suggestions for improving the quality of the manuscript. We made all suggestions provided by reviewer; all changes are highlighted in red font in the text. Also, the following responses to reviewer are typed in red.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer's comments to the author:

Recommendation: major revision

Dear author / s,

Many thanks for offering your research entitled "Effects of entrepreneurial attitudes and business models on environmental public goods and services", aimed to investigating the level of transaction costs perceived by farmers engaged in AECMs, as these costs have the potential to influence their business decisions.

The authors explore an interesting relationship to gain deeper insights into the possible factors affecting such perceptions and understand how they might affect farmers’ entrepreneurial attitudes and decisions toward the implementation of environment-friendly management practices through AECMs.

The article appears well founded in structural and theoretical architecture. However, I have encountered some major issues that make it unsuitable for publication at this stage.

- Starting from the abstract and the introduction, the manuscript should emphasize the research gap it intends to fill, highlighting the theoretical and practical contribution provided.

- Introduction: this section should provide information on the originality of the work compared to previous literature. The potential of the contribution is unclear, furthermore the research design and methodology used should be exploded. Finally, the introduction should clarify why authors focus their attention on agricultural sector.

- Literature review: The theoretical framework is complete enough. However, the authors should better explode the search gap in the scientific literature. For this reason, it would be important to better explore why GEO is modelled as firms’ intangible asset that is linked to sustainable performance.

Please, you can consider these international studies:

Santoro, G., Messeni-Petruzzelli, A., & Del Giudice, M. (2021). Searching for resilience: The impact of employee-level and entrepreneur-level resilience on firm performance in small family firms. Small Business Economics, 57, 455-471.

Scuotto, V., Del Giudice, M., Garcia-Perez, A., Orlando, B., & Ciampi, F. (2020). A spill over effect of entrepreneurial orientation on technological innovativeness: an outlook of universities and research based spin offs. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 45, 1634-1654.

Nespoli, C., Kozan, A., Scuotto, V., & Giudice, M. D. (2022). Aimage's entrepreneurial value creation and crowdfunding: Entrepreneurship in times of crisis. The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 23(2), 76-85.

Malik, A., Pereira, V., Budhwar, P., Varma, A., & Del Giudice, M. (2022). Sustainable innovations in an indigenous Indian Ayurvedic MNE. Journal of Business Research, 145, 402-413.

Santoro, G., Ferraris, A., Del Giudice, M., & Schiavone, F. (2020). Self‐efficacy and success of disadvantaged entrepreneurs: The moderating role of resilience. European Management Review, 17(3), 719-732.

- Methodology: This document used a quantitative methodology. Indeed, the choice of variables should be better justified and supported by previous studies.

 Many statements included in this section are unreferenced.

- Results and Discussion: I suggest using a more critical approach in the discussion of the results, considering the theoretical framework used and the recent literature. In this line, the discussion section should be better defined based on the search gap.

The authors describe the limitations and future avenues of research, but do not conclude the article with some key aspects of their research that would emphasize the original contributions.

-Proofreading
I suggest also a proofreading and a complete revision of the paper, since there are many punctuation errors.

Author Response

We would thank the anonymous reviewer for his comments and the appreciated suggestions for improving the quality of the manuscript. We made all suggestions provided by reviewer; all changes are highlighted in red font in the text. Also, the following responses to reviewer are typed in red.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper addresses an exciting and vital issue that involves environmental issues and entrepreneurial perception.

I recommend the following adjustments:

1. This paper has a fascinating subject; I recommend pointing out the objective, expectation, relevance, and research justification transparently; the section would be much easier to read if you included some subtitles. 

2. In your literature review approach, I think you should include a table of the most relevant authors and papers that are the theoretical support for this research. This table may include reference authors, journals, hypotheses, research design, and findings.

3. Please review and update your references, there are many cited works from papers older than five years (before 2018). It is suggested that you have a 60/40 ratio of newer papers over those older than 2018.

4. This paper has an interesting qualitative approach due to the type of research. First, I recommend including a diagram to explain graphically the research design that was implemented. Second, I consider that the number of interviews is sufficient enough to make a code analysis using Nvivo, Atlas Ti, or another qualitative analysis software, even though I do recommend including a semantic network to increase the understanding of perception and sentiment analysis from the subjects related to this paper.

5. In your findings, I also recommend including a structured order for presenting this phase of your research. Indicate where the discussion begins and ends and where the conclusions do this as well. Are your objective satisfied? What is the next step for your research? Compare your results with previous works and confirm or challenge the current literature on the matter. Explain thoroughly the importance of your findings and how this is prof that benefits society.

Thank you and good luck

Author Response

We would thank the anonymous reviewer for his comments and the appreciated suggestions for improving the quality of the manuscript. We made all suggestions provided by reviewer; all changes are highlighted in red font in the text. Also, the following responses to reviewer are typed in red.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

NA

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear author (s),

thank you for submitting your revised manuscript.

I really appreciate the efforts to make the last revisions, especially in introduction and results.

Now, the paper is well constructed, the literature is fluent and consistent; finally, results are critically discussed.

Therefore, in my opinion the paper can be published in this version.

Congratulation

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf