Social Networks and Technology Adoption in Northern Mozambique

Oriana Bandiera and Imran Rasul

STICERD - Development Economics Papers - From 2008 this series has been superseded by Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: Despite their potentially strong impact on poverty, agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly. Using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in Mozambique, we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks. Since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others, we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters. Dynamic considerations, however, suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption and to free-ride on the information gathered by others. We present empirical evidence which shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse-U. In line with information sharing, the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others. The data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context. In particular social networks are precisely identified, and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group information.

Keywords: Social networks; technology adoption; information sharing. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-ino, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/de/dedps35.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social Networks and Technology Adoption in Northern Mozambique (2006)
Working Paper: Social Networks and Technology Adoption in Northern Mozambique (2002)
Working Paper: Social networks and technology adoption in Northern Mozambique (2002)
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:cep:stidep:35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in STICERD - Development Economics Papers - From 2008 this series has been superseded by Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().