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

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.