Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>This article studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) are typically paid piece rates, with no incentive to reduce waste, and the new technology slows them down, at least initially. Fearing reductions in their effective wage, employees resist adoption in various ways, including by misinforming owners about the value of the technology. To investigate this hypothesis, we implemented a second experiment among the firms that originally received the technology: we offered one cutter and one printer per firm a lump-sum payment, approximately a month’s earnings, conditional on demonstrating competence in using the technology in the presence of the owner. This incentive payment, small from the point of view of the firm, had a significant positive effect on adoption. The results suggest that misalignment of incentives within firms is an important barrier to technology adoption in our setting. </p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx010 Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question To what extent do which high costs of high-quality inputs are a barrier to upgrading in the football sector? Sample Trial population and sample selection Active firms that either received the technology we invented for the previous study, or active firms that responded to at least two surveys in the previous study, produce on average less than 75k balls/month, and have fewer than 100 employee Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description A subsidy is given to producers to encourage the adoption for new technology. Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables <p>Technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producer, spillovers, changes in other inputs (e.g., the quality of the bladder or latex glue), shifts in the composition of output toward higher-quality footballs and output prices, the composition of the buyers (e.g., the country of origin of the buyers) and other process innovations (e.g., adopting a cost-saving innovation developed by Atkin et al (2015) to reduce wastage of the high-quality rexine?)</p> Results <p>The subsidy alone did not bring on adoption; however, incentive payment, small from the point of view of the firm, had a significant positive effect on adoption. </p> Intervention costs PKR 650,000 voucher value per treatment firm (maximum cost if a firm used all vouchers) Cost benefit ratio Reference Atkin, D., Chaudhry, A., Chaudry, S., Khandelwal, A. (2017). 'Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan'. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Citation for use in academic references
