Social Networks and Technology Adoption in Northern Mozambique

We present evidence on how farmers’ decisions to adopt a new crop relate to the adoption choices of their network of family and friends. We find the relationship to be inverse-U shaped, suggesting social effects are positive when there are few adopters in the network, and negative when there are many. We also find the adoption decisions of farmers who have better information about the new crop are less sensitive to the adoption choices of others. Finally, we find that adoption decisions are more correlated within family and friends than religion-based networks, and uncorrelated among individuals of different religions.