Land Allocation in HYV Adoption Models: An Investigation of Alternative Explanations

Abstract Microeconomic theory provides four competing explanations for partial land allocation to new and traditional seed varieties in HYV adoption decisions: input fixity, portfolio selection, safety‐first behavior, and learning. Testing a general model that contains each as a special case suggests that they are jointly most likely to explain land allocation in the HYV adoption decisions of Malawian smallholders. Yet when each explanation is tested to the exclusion of the others (as is usually the case in the literature), competing hypotheses are individually significant. Results suggest that employing approaches based on single explanations may lead to inappropriately narrow conclusions.