## 1 Introduction
This kind of knowledge acquisition entails a notion of co-production being set exactly at the intersection of academic and non-academic actors [12] and therefore may prove to be more effective than ESs in triggering farmers' interest and make them work more closely with researchers [8; 10; 13; 14]. Despite the importance of PRPs in fostering sustainability and technology transfer in agriculture, research on the factors affecting farmers' decision-making with regard to their participation or not in a PRP is still scarce. Most of the past studies of farmers' decision-making focused on issues such as participation in Agricultural Environmental Schemes (AES), shift to organic farming, contribution to local conservation, and realization of investments [15; 16]. As for decision-making of farmers for participation in knowledge acquisition activities, much attention has been given to the ESs. Many authors have analyzed the factors affecting willingness to participate in ESs by using, as a proxy, willingness to pay for these services. Authors use a mix of factors in order to explain the variability of Willingness to Pay and Participate (WTPP) which are quite relative with sociodemographic characteristics of farmers (age, education, etc. ), their farm and business characteristics (type of farm, income, and tenure), and their characteristics of services provided referring on how these are perceived by the farmers (quality, frequency, scope, distance from farmers, etc.) [17; 18; 19; 20]. Some authors have further elaborated on this issue by incorporating some motivational theories, in order to explain farmers' participation in AES. To this end, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [21], in their study in Benin, found that two non-exclusive motivational directions, diversion or congruence, were observed in the farmers' sample and that the prevailing direction for each farmer was the result of his/her socioeconomic characteristics and experiences. Finally, [PERSON] et al. [22] used the Self-Determination theory in order to identify the basic motivations behind Greek farmers' participation in ESs. Authors used 30 items that loaded in six factors of _Motives_ and also incorporated some sociodemographic variables in a regression model for predicting the participation of farmers in ESs. The present paper builds on the work done in modeling the behavior of farmers regarding various types of decisions and especially those concerning their participation in ESs. It develops and tests a model for understanding the driving factors of farmers' participation in PRPs which are still understudied in comparison with those of ESs. To do so, an explanatory framework with three main factors' categories and a binomial regression analysis are incorporated into the analysis. Moreover, the paper is innovative in that it does not only capture the effect of the driving factors in the participation of farmers in PRPs, but also estimates their relative importance, compared with this of all other factors. To do so, a Shapley-Owen R\({}^{2}\) decomposition analysis is conducted after the logistic regression analysis. The paper has two main contributions in the field of farmers' decision-making: First, it extends the empirical analyses of farmers' participation in knowledge acquisition activities to also incorporate PRPs, and second it provides a method for understanding the relative importance of the factors which have not been considered by past relevant studies. This perhaps is the major objective of this study, to shed more light onto how much clear are the benefits for farmers if they decide to be members in groups of PRPs. The up to now, authors' experience on this realizes the farmers' skepticism, but it is not clear their decision-making process to either participate or not in such schemes.