Adoption of innovation in agriculture: a critical review of economic and psychological models

Two main models have been used to analyse farmers' decisions to adopt an innovation; the first is based on the concept of utility maximisation (UM) and the second is based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). This study uses a vote-count method to identify the effect of different variables on farmers' adoption decisions in 36 studies using either UM or the TPB. Results from the UM studies show that the explanatory variables mostly have an insignificant effect on the adoption decision. When the effects are significant, the sign of the effect is inconsistent across studies. Results from the TPB studies show that correlations between the psychological constructs used in this type of model are significant in most cases. However, most variables are only used in one or two studies and it is therefore not possible to detect a clear pattern across studies that used the TPB model.