Competition or cooperation? Using team and tournament incentives for learning among female farmers in rural Uganda

Kathryn Vasilaky () and Asif Islam

World Development, 2018, vol. 103, issue C, 216-225

Abstract: This study explores the behavioral learning characteristics of smallholder female farmers in Uganda by quantifying the amount of information learned under different incentive schemes. The paper shows how competitive versus team incentives compare in motivating Ugandan farmers to learn and share information relevant to adopting a new agricultural technology. We find that tournament-based incentives provide greater outcomes in terms of total information learned than threshold-based team incentives. Furthermore the order of the incentive – whether the tournament precedes or follows the team incentive scheme – does not affect the volume of information learned. New information introduced between rounds was learned by more individuals under team incentives than under tournament incentives. The study provides direct practical policy recommendations for improving learning in the context of agriculture in Uganda.

Keywords: Team; Tournaments; Competition; Learning; Agricultural training; Uganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 C93 O13 O33 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17303479
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:103:y:2018:i:c:p:216-225

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.10.023

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().