Title: Opinion leaders' influence and innovations adoption between risk-averse and risk-taking farmers

Authors: Albert Yosua; Shuang Chang; Hiroshi Deguchi

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan ' Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan ' Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Abstract: This research aims to study innovations adoption behaviour of farmers, especially when the opinion leaders are present and the others, who follow these opinion leaders, have different attitudes to risk. An agent-based model was constructed to simulate opinion leaders' influence and farmers' subjective risk level change on the number of adopters. From the results, the intervention by opinion leaders appeared to increase the number of adopters who are risk-averse farmers, retained the number of adopters from declining in the case of risk-taking farmers, and caused few farmers to have less cumulative income at the end of the simulation. This paper provides an alternative approach to analysing the effectiveness of opinion leaders on accelerating the diffusion of innovations. When agricultural policy-makers plan to increase innovations adoption through opinion leaders' intervention, the policy-makers should pay attention to farmers' risk attitudes and their learning processes during the experimentation with the innovations.

Keywords: opinion leaders; risk attitudes; risk-averse farmers; risk-taking farmers; risk perceptions; subjective risk; agricultural innovations; adoption process; agent-based approach; social simulation; expected utility theory; Bayes' theorem; agricultural policy-making.

DOI: 10.1504/IJARGE.2019.102167

International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology, 2019 Vol.15 No.2, pp.121 - 144

Received: 11 Jun 2018
Accepted: 10 Mar 2019
Published online: 09 Sep 2019 *

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