报告题目：Agricultural Innovation and Technology Adoption: Incentives for Delay Reconsidered

主讲人：Robert Shupp教授

主持人：金松青教授

时间：2019年10月15号（周二）上午10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.

地点：浙江大学紫金港校区启真大厦1213

主讲人简介：

Robert Shupp是实验经济学家，毕业于以实验经济学和行为经济学见长的Indiana University，曾经是诺贝尔经济学奖Elinor Ostrom教授的研究助理。Robert Shupp教授的文章发表于Economics Journal, Games and Economics Behavior, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, American Journal of Agricultural Economics,Journal of Urban Economics等经济学、行为经济学和和农业经济学知名期刊。Robert Shupp教授现任教于密歇根州立大学农经系（个人主页https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/shupp/）。

摘要：

Providing producers with productivity enhancing agricultural technologies as well as the incentives to adopt technological improvements is an important part of maintaining long term gains in agricultural productivity. The rate at which new technologies become available to producers and the expected net return to each innovation are important components of producer decisions over whether and when to adopt a costly new technology. Uncertainty over future choices and returns generated by stochastic rates of innovation may generate incentives for individuals to delay adoption of a new technology, especially when further technological improvements are expected to arrive in the near future. Using a lab experiment, we implement high and low innovation rate treatments to test for behavioral effects on the probability of adopting a new technology and the number of technologies adopted. Our decision environment incorporates technologies that generate stochastic returns, partial irreversibility through fixed arrival costs, and uncertain arrivals of and returns to future innovations. In addition, we use a lottery choice experiment to measure participant risk aversion and incorporate this measure into our models to test the effect of risk aversion on individual technology adoption behavior. We find mixed results for the effect of increased rates of innovation. Participants in the high innovation rate treatment group are more likely to adopt a new technology as soon as it arrives and are less likely to continue using a current technology within a given round. However, when comparing across a common set of technologies, subjects in the high innovation rate treatment adopt fewer innovations overall. We also find that risk-averse individuals are less likely to immediately adopt new technologies. Overall this research suggests that large increases in the rate of technological innovation are unlikely to drive significant levels of delay in the uptake of new technologies.