Innovation adoption in agriculture : innovators, early adopters and laggards

This paper analyses the choice of a farmer to be an innovator, an early adopter or a laggard (an adopter of mature technologies or a non-adopter) in the adoption of innovations that are available on the market. We estimate a nested logit model with data from a large sample of Dutch farmers. We find that structural characteristics (farm size, market position, solvency, age of the farmer) explain the difference in adoption behaviour between innovators and early adopters on the one hand and laggards on the other. We also find that early adopters and innovators do not differ from each other regarding these structural characteristics. However, they appear to differ in behavioural characteristics : innovators make more use of external sources of information and they are more involved in the actual development of innovations.

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