EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan

Eric Verhoogen, ,, David Atkin, Azam Chaudhry and Shamyla Chaudry
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Amit Khandelwal

No 10735, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the arguably unambiguous net benefits of the technology for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) are typically paid piece rates, with no incentive to reduce waste, and the new technology slows them down, at least initially. Fearing reductions in their effective wage, employees resist adoption in various ways, including by misinforming owners about the value of the technology. To investigate this hypothesis, we implemented a second experiment among the firms that originally received the technology: we offered one cutter and one printer per firm a lump-sum payment, approximately equal to a monthly wage, conditional on them demonstrating competence in using the technology in the presence of the owner. This incentive payment, small from the point of view of the firm, had a significant positive effect on adoption. We interpret the results as supportive of the hypothesis that misalignment of incentives within firms is an important barrier to technology adoption in our setting.

Keywords: Manufacturing firms; Organizations; Soccer/football; Technology adoption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D2 L2 O1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10735 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan (2017) Downloads
Working Paper: Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan (2015) Downloads
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:cpr:ceprdp:10735

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10735

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10735