Beyond farm resources: Entrepreneurial and behavioral determinants of profit efficiency in paddy farming

Abstract Context: The enhancement of farm profitability is not just a matter of access to productive resources, but also depends on the perception of opportunities, risk management, farm information and access, and decision-making regarding resource allocation. However, the behavioral and entrepreneurial nature of farm profit inefficiency has not been adequately comprehended. Objective: This study aims to examine the linkages between farmers' entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial intention, and profit efficiency in paddy cultivation. Methods: The study is based on primary data collected from a sample of 389 paddy farmers in four districts of Tamil Nadu, India, using a stochastic profit frontier model, principal component analysis, and beta regression to derive estimates of profit efficiency and the behavioral and socio-economic determinants of profit efficiency. Results and conclusion: The outcomes show that profit efficiency was 86.5 percent, and there was significant variation among the farms ranging from 35.8% to 99%. Education, family size, farming experience, training, access to the Uzhavan App, economic motivation, and innovativeness are positively associated with profit efficiency, whereas family involvement in agriculture, farmer-producer organization membership, market information access, cropping land, information-seeking behavior, and proactiveness show negative associations. Entrepreneurial intention, risk-taking, autonomy, need for achievement, risk orientation, achievement motivation, and decision-making behavior are not statistically significant. These findings demonstrate that entrepreneurial characteristics do not uniformly translate into greater profit efficiency; their effects depend on how entrepreneurial and behavioral orientations interact with farm management and resource-allocation conditions. Significance: The study contributes to farm-efficiency research by bringing farmer-level entrepreneurial and behavioral heterogeneity into the explanation of profit efficiency and offers implications for designing more capability-oriented extension, market, training, and farm-management interventions.