Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on‐going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non‐students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi‐period business management game that is adapted to an agri‐environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.

中文翻译：

---

比较学生和农民的依从行为。德国农业环境微调背景下的实验室外实验

经济实验越来越多地用于政策影响分析，这引起了有关学生是否适合替代专业人士作为实验学科的争论。迄今为止，尚未对农业和资源经济学实验中的主题库效应进行充分研究。为了确定学生与非学生之间的差异和相似之处，我们以适合农业环境的多周期业务管理游戏的形式进行了实验。我们比较了德国农业学生和德国农民在水保护规则方面的遵守行为，并分析了他们对两种不同的绿色推动措施的反应。实验结果表明，对政策措施的回应方向是相似的。学生样本甚至可以重现意外行为。然而，两个样品之间的治疗效果大小不同。这意味着农业和资源经济学领域的实验者可以利用学生的主题库来分析轻推政策的方向。如果应该对幅度影响做出预测，我们建议使用专业的主题库。