Technology Adoption in Poorly Specified Environments

Pilar Useche

No 9887, 2007 Annual Meeting, July 29-August 1, 2007, Portland, Oregon from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: This article extends the characteristics-based choice framework of technology adoption to account for decisions taken by boundedly-rational individuals in environments where traits are not fully observed. It is applied to an agricultural setting and introduces the concept of ambiguity in the agricultural technology adoption literature by relaxing strict informational and cognition related assumptions that are implied by traditional Bayesian analysis. The main results confirm that ambiguity increases as local conditions become less homogeneous and as computational ability, own experience and nearby adoption rates decrease. Measurement biases associated with full rationality assumptions are found to increase when decision makers have low computational ability, low experience and when their farming conditions differ widely from average adopter ones. A complementary empirical paper (Useche 2006) finds that models assuming low confidence in observed data, ambiguity and pessimistic expectations about traits predict sample shares better than models which assume that farmers do not face ambiguity or are optimistic about the traits of new varieties.

Keywords: Research; and; Development/Tech; Change/Emerging; Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/9887/files/sp07us01.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aaea07:9887

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.9887

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2007 Annual Meeting, July 29-August 1, 2007, Portland, Oregon from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().