Knowledge Sharing and Learning Among Smallholders in Developing Economies: Implications, Incentives, and Reward Mechanisms
研究了发展中国家小农在竞争下自愿分享知识的意愿，发现高知识农户不愿分享，导致共享水平低于最优，并提出一种基于配额的奖励机制来激励农户达到高效共享水平。
In developing economies, smallholders apply their own specialized knowledge and exert costly effort to manage their farms. To raise overall productivity, NGOs and governments are advocating various knowledge-sharing and learning platforms for farmers to exchange a variety of farming techniques. Putting altruism aside, we examine the overall economic implications for heterogeneous farmers sharing their private knowledge voluntarily with others under (implicit) competition. By analyzing a multiperson sequential game, we find that farmers with high knowledge are reluctant to share knowledge, and consequently, the voluntary shared level is always lower than or equal to the "efficient" shared level that maximizes farmer welfare under coordination. This finding is motivational in developing a reward mechanism to entice farmers to elevate their knowledge shared level in a decentralized system so as to maximize farmer welfare. On reviewing different mechanisms, we propose a quota-based reward mechanism that can entice farmers to share knowledge voluntarily up to the efficient shared level.