Abstract: At present, the quality safety of agro-products are being widely concerned. In the context of dispersed production by thousands of rural households, it is of great practical significance to discuss how to prevent the occurrence of farmers’ moral hazard behaviors. Taking the survey data of 389 vegetable cultivation households in Jiangxi, Anhui, Henan and Jiangsu provinces as the samples, this paper studies the factors influencing farmers’ moral hazard behaviors with the structural equation model. The results show that three latent variables, i.e., farmers’ attitude, government regulation and the informal institutions can negatively and significantly affect farmers’ moral hazard behaviors. It also puts forward some policy suggestions from such aspects as improving farmers’ awareness of the rural environmental pollution and the quality safety of agro-products, strengthening government’s regulation on agricultural production activities, and giving full play to the binding force of rural informal institutions.

Key words: farmer’s behavior; moral hazard behavior; safety of agro-products; government regulation