Abstract
The key idea of our research project is to test how social proof and coordination cost shape collective framing of technology adoption among smallholder farmers. In many agricultural technology adoption settings, an individual farmer's willingness to try a new product depends not only on her own information, but also on what she believes her peers are doing and on the extent to which successful adoption may depend on others' participation (Conley and Udry 2010). This distinguishes the mechanism we study from existing social-learning studies of technology diffusion, which are typically sequential, with early adopters acting first and neighbors subsequently learning by observing their outcomes (Foster and Rosenzweig 1995), rather than involving a simultaneous coordination problem that engineers simultaneous adoption of newer technology at scale.
The study also moves beyond digital advisory platforms that operate primarily as information channels (Fábregas et al. 2019; Cole et al. 2025) by examining whether a platform can actively structure the social environment surrounding an adoption decision. We study this in the context of a sustainable crop-care campaign promoting agricultural products that are relatively unfamiliar to many smallholder farmers, where uncertainty about product efficacy may make peer behavior particularly relevant.
We test these ideas using a four-condition cluster-randomized field experiment on an agricultural digital platform in India. Farmers receive either an Individual Offer, in which access to a 50% discount depends only on the farmer's own decision, or one of three Group Offer conditions, in which the discount is unlocked only if a required number of community members sign up for the offer. Within the Group Offer conditions, we vary the peer sign-up information farmers receive and the coordination cost associated with reaching the threshold for such sign-ups. We operationalize coordination cost as the number of additional farmer sign-ups required for the group to reach the threshold and unlock the discount.
The primary comparison tests whether introducing a group-contingent offer increases sign-up relative to an otherwise individual offer. Additional comparisons examine whether favorable peer social proof under low coordination costs increases sign-up, and whether increasing coordination costs versus social proof reduces sign-up while holding the displayed number of prior farmer sign-ups fixed. We further examine whether initial offer sign-up translates into subsequent self -expressed interest in adoption as well as purchase conversion. The experiment therefore studies two stages of the adoption process: farmers' initial willingness to join the offer and their subsequent completion of a product purchase.
The study has implications for how digital platforms in emerging markets can not only reduce informational barriers to agricultural technology adoption amongst resource-constrained smallholder farmers but also utilize social and coordination barriers surrounding the adoption decision to promote adoption of sustainable or unfamiliar products at scale.