When there are competing technologies or products with unknown payoffs an important question is which technology will prevail and whether technologies with different payoffs can coexist in the long run. In this paper, we use a social learning model with local interactions to study this question....

When payoffs from different actions are unknown, agents use their own past experience as well as the experience of their neighbors to guide their current decision making. This paper develops a general framework to study the relationship between the structure of information flows and the process...

The aim of this article is to examine conceptually and empirically how innovative firms combine knowledge (1) provided by different sources, (2) accessed at different spatial scales, and (3) acquired through different channels. We add to the conceptual debate by contrasting and synthesizing the...

A panel data, (67 provinces and the years 1993-1995) of the Turkish agriculture, was employed to estimate technical efficiencies for six agricultural regions and 67 provinces using maximum likelihood techniques (ML). Stochastic frontier based on Cobb-Douglas production function with agricultural...

Much of the debate between the European and U.S. positions about labeling of genetically modified foods has been whether consumers perceive labels as a source of information or a signal to change behavior. In this paper, we provide an experimental framework for examining these roles of...

This paper examines trade and welfare effects of biotechnology. While biotechnology lowers production costs, it also lowers perceived quality of products. Without labelling, consumers cannot distinguish between biotechnology and conventional products. In a simple general equilibrium model of...

This paper examines why different countries export different qualities of products.Previous studies have attributed quality dispersion to differences in factor endowments while no empirical work has been done examining the effect of technology on quality. Using panel data on U.S. imports from 58...

The role of twentieth-century agricultural mechanization in changing the productivity, employment opportunities, and appearance of rural America has long been appreciated. Less attention has been paid to the impact made by farm tractors, combines, and associated equipment on the standard of...

A methodology for measuring public agricultural research capital is developed and described for the first time, new public agricultural research capital measures for each of the 48 contiguous US states, 1970-1999, are presented, and a new econometric analysis of the contribution of public...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the co-evolution between agricultural biotechnology and biosafety process, with a special focus on Brazilian case. This rapid diffusion process has occurred in parallel with a high transaction cost process of regulation, combining local, territorial, national...