Summary:
Usage of information technology - Historical development, and perspective
Information Technology (IT) is widely used in agriculture nowadays. However, it has not been adopted as many expected. We try to explain this by the transaction cost (TAC) and principal agent (PA) approaches. IT can be used to decrease intern TAC and reduce information asymmetry. But there are alternatives to achieve this goals: outsourcing or new organisational form that need less agents. These alternatives directly compete with IT and have been used by the farmer in the past. Prediction and uncertainty problems are disadvantages of planning programs and credibility is often considered low. Furthermore the acceptance of IT is influenced by several factors: the profitability, operating time requirements, objective of the pro gram, and characteristics of the user.
We expect four major trends for the future: IT will be used for a) processing large data amounts, b) teaching and learning, c) idea generating and problem solving, and d) consideration of risk.
