| วัตถุประสงค์
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Several studies have analyzed determinants of adoption of modern/improved technologies by farmers in developing countries using simple ad-hoc models. These are typically OLS, probit or tobit regressions of technology adoption on variables representing: (a) socio-economic circumstances of farmers - such as, farm size, tenurial status, farmer education levels, farming experience, family size, gender, etc., and (b) institutional and physical infrastructures - such as, irrigation, credit, extension contacts, membership in organizations, distance to markets/bus stops/extension office, etc.. (e.g., Hossain, 1989; Ahmed and Hossain, 1990; Nkamleu and Adesina, 2000; Shiyani, et al., 2002; Floyd et al., 2003; Ransom, et al., 2003; Asfaw and Admassie, 2004). Few of these studies outlined implicit theoretical underpinning of such ad-hoc modeling (e.g., Nkamleu and Adesina, 2000) which is the assumption of utility maximization by rational farmers. Furthermore, all of these studies ignored or omitted price factors (both input and output prices) as determinants of technology adoption which has important bearing on productivity, profitability and resource allocation decisions, and concentrated only on non-price factors discussed above, hence providing an incomplete picture of farmer's decision-making process.
The model of technology adoption developed by Pitt (1983) explicitly takes into account price and non-price factors in determining adoption while allowing for switching varieties but assumes farmers to be fully efficient in their production technologies. With the development of parametric frontier analysis by Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt (1977), large number of studies followed which typically place farming efficiency of developing country farmers in a range of 60% to 82% percent (Rahman, 2003; Coelli et al., 2002; Ali and Flinn, 1989; Wang et al., 1999). Therefore, analysis of factors determining technology adoption under the assumption of fully efficient farmer inherently incorporates bias in the results. The contribution of this study to the existing literature on the economics of technology adoption (Jasmine rice in this case) as well as efficiency analyses is on the extension of the model of technology adoption developed by Pitt (1983) by relaxing the restrictive assumption of fully efficient farmers which is then used to jointly address our three key research questions mentioned above.
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