Summary
Sustaining competitiveness over the long run can suggest that decision makers must acquire knowledge to support the selection of technology systems and an understanding of an implemented technology. Social learning is an important source of knowledge acquisition as the decision maker exchanges and discusses information with other decision makers via social communication. The empirical questions are (i) how does the decision maker choose learning partners, and (ii) how does the social learning behavior influence the firm's production decision and technology over time? This study constructs an econometric model to reflect the connection between the decision maker's social learning and the production behavior. The latent class stochastic frontier model (LCSFM) is used to estimate a model of heterogeneous learning using the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) India data. Since caste rank plays an important role in people's social life in rural areas in India, the empirical results reveals the connection between social learning and production behavior by showing the importance of caste rank in production decisions.
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Extract
Social Learning and Production Heterogeneity
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
INTRODUCTIONThe decision maker focuses on making efficiency gains to ensure that the implemented technology is successful and on innovations to push the competitive envelope and sustain the firm's competitive position in the long run. The effective management of knowledge contributes to both sources of profitability growth.Knowledge management is a learning process involving two phases: (i) the information acquisition phase, and (ii) the knowledge updating phase where a learning mechanism is employed to transfer the information collected into additional knowledge. The decision maker may engage in social learning in both phases. The information acquisition phase involves social learning if the decision maker not only collects internal information from historical data but also engages in additional effort to communicate with others to acquire external information. The knowledge updating phase engages in social learning if the decision maker discuss the information collected with other decision makers as they update their knowledge base jointly. The possibility that the decision maker can engage in different levels of social learni...See the full content of this document
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