Date: Oct.15^th, 2019

Time: 10:00-11:30

Speaker: Robert Shupp

Venue: Room 1213, the Administration Building, Zijingang Campus

【Speaker Intro】

Robert Shupp, Associate Professor of Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington. His primary teaching and research interests are in the area of experimental economics with a focus on application to topics in agricultural economics. His papers have been published on famous journals such as Economics Journal, Games and Economics Behavior, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Journal of Urban Economics.

【Abstract】

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.