Casaburi et al., 2014).<sup>11</sup> More efforts to increase farmers’ access to agricultural advice are currently under way, e.g., the ‘Netflix for Agriculture’ initiative by Fabregas et al. (2017).

According to Anderson and Feder (2007), 80% of the world’s extension services are publicly funded and delivered by civil servants. While in the past such programs have predominantly been characterized by top-down and supply-driven approaches, the focus has shifted in recent years toward making extension more demand driven (Anderson, 2007; Davis, 2008). Several factors have contributed to this development. First, the collapse of the Training and Visit (T&V) system<sup>12</sup> in the late 1990s has led to the rise of a more pluralistic model of providing and financing extension services, involving stronger decentralization, privatization, and involvement of NGOs and farmer-based organizations. This process has shifted the focus to the demand side of extension services by emphasizing the importance of increasing farmers’ voice and participation as compared to traditional top-down approaches (Rivera and Alex, 2005; Birner and Anderson, 2007).<sup>13</sup> Second, the transformation in the agricultural extension sector towards demand-driven approaches has been linked to a more general paradigm shift in public sector reform toward responsive governance, which advocates accountability and empowerment to increase the effectiveness of public service provision (including in many other sectors such as health and education; see United Nations, 2005; Birner and Anderson, 2007). Finally, the rapid diffusion of information and communication technologies has contributed to the promotion of demanddriven approaches to extension, by reducing the cost and providing new possibilities for farmers to access agricultural advice based on their own individual-specific needs.

# **3 Theory: Demand for agricultural advice under costly attention**

This section presents a stylized model that is able to explain (i) why farmers may rationally decide not to participate in extension services, and (ii) why non-agricultural shocks can increase farmers’ demand for agricultural advice and participation in extension services. The model builds upon the following three main assumptions. First, farmers have access to sources of agricultural advice (e.g., extension services), and believe that engaging with these sources has a positive effect on production. Second, requesting and benefiting from

> 11Examples of such technologies include mobile phone apps and hotlines that offer farmers the possibility to acquire information about farm practices, weather, and relevant prices, as well as online systems where farmers can send photos or show crops affected by diseases to a web camera in order to receive advice on treatment. A survey of ICT-based agricultural extension programs is provided in Aker (2011). 12The T&V system was a public extension model promoted by the World Bank from 1975 until 1995 to increase the adoption of “Green Revolution” technologies (mainly high-yielding seed varieties, fertilizer, and other agrochemicals) in more than 70 countries (Anderson, 2007).

> 13In part, this may also have been driven by the need to achieve greater scope for cost recovery in order to facilitate privatization and contracting of extension services, which are core elements of the new pluralistic model (Anderson, 2007).

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