Social Learning and Incentives for Experimentation and Communication
通过大规模田野实验，研究不同社会网络成员作为推广员时，其自身采用和努力受小激励影响，且社会身份影响他人学习与采用，对农业技术推广政策有启示。
Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Many countries hire agricultural extension agents to communicate with farmers about new technologies, even though a large academic literature has established that information from social networks is a key determinant of product adoption. We incorporate social learning in extension policy using a large-scale field experiment in which we communicate to farmers using different members of social networks. We show that communicator own adoption and effort are susceptible to small performance incentives, and the social identity of the communicator influences others’ learning and adoption. Farmers appear most convinced by communicators who share a group identity with them, or who face comparable agricultural conditions. Exploring the incentives for injection points in social networks to experiment with and communicate about new technologies can take the influential social learning literature in a more policy-relevant direction.