Cultivating Peer-to-Peer Sharing

[Sponsored Article]

Agriculture long ago declined in importance in developed economies, but in the developing world it remains the dominant sector. However, its development is hindered by low productivity. To overcome this, non-governmental organizations and for-profit social enterprises provide learning opportunities for farmers.

The recent voice-based information service, Avaaj Otalo (“voice porch” or “voice stoop”), provides a novel platform to facilitate both learning and sharing channels in Gujarat, India. The discussion board allows farmers to raise questions, interact with others, and post answers to questions. The platform moderator hires specialists to monitor the Q&A forum and interact with farmers, but a significant portion of responses to farmers’ questions were from other farmers. This novel social peer-to-peer knowledge exchange creates a vivid social media that can integrate both knowledge learning and sharing.

This feature raises a number of questions. Will farmers voluntarily share their knowledge? Is the shared knowledge of high quality? Do farmers prefer learning from the experts to receiving knowledge shared by peers? How does the platform facilitate reliable knowledge-sharing among farmers? Answers to these questions are instrumental to understanding the unique socioeconomic features in developing countries or emerging markets. They may provide useful guidelines for non-governmental organizations or social enterprises to convert the poor into productive micro-entrepreneurs such as farmers, fishermen, itinerant workers, or small shop keepers.

Ying-Ju Chen, J. George Shanthikumar and Zuo-Jun Max Shen constructed a stylized model in which a set of farmers can post questions in the forum for help. There is a local market for the farmers to sell their products to buyers, who specify a minimum quantity. This is intended to capture the economy of scales of transportation, logistics, and administration that the buyers encounter before making the transactions. A representative expert is hired to regularly monitor the forum and respond to farmers’ questions. Nevertheless, due to the limited capacity, the expert is not always responsive. Among the farmers, a core user has the ability to respond to other fellow farmers’ questions. She can choose to be silent, or actively respond to the farmers’ questions.