A research study by Professor Priyank Arora has won the 2022 People’s Choice Award at the recently concluded Early-career Sustainable Operations Workshop. At this workshop (organized by the Wharton School on Feb. 26-27), Arora and his coauthors showcased their ongoing study that examines the “Uber for tractors” business model in emerging economies. In recent years, there is a rapid rise in the number of farm equipment sharing platforms in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-pacific regions that help smallholder farmers to gain access to mechanization services through mobile apps. The main lesson from this research study is that the farm equipment sharing platforms should be cautious about applying popular findings and policies from “Uber” models in the developed economies.
In addition to the service providers (tractor owners) and the users (farmers), these sharing platforms consist of an important third entity, called the booking agents. They serve as intermediaries who aggregate demand from several smallholder farmers and submit the service request on the app for this big cluster of farms. Low digital literacy and mistrust for “big” technology-based businesses among farmers make the presence of booking agents a crucial element in this business model. However, a main reason for the presence of booking agents is purely dictated by economics: The equipment owners find it unprofitable to list their equipment for sharing because farmers are spatially distributed in most developing nations. On top of this, the farm sizes are extremely small, which implies that they might end up traveling several miles to serve only a fraction of a hectare. Thus, the aggregation of demand by booking agents forms an integral part of such platforms.
Priyank Arora and his coauthors Olufunke Adebola, Accenture, and Can Zhang, Duke University, are working closely with Hello Tractor to help improve operations of such platforms in order to enhance the reach of agriculture mechanization and benefit smallholder farmers. Hello Tractor is an award-winning technology services platform that connects smallholder farmers with tractor owners to help farmers reap benefits of mechanization by eliminating the need for them to own an expensive equipment.
Early-career Sustainable Operations Workshop aims to provide research showcase and networking opportunities for early-career scholars who work in sustainable operations domain. This year’s workshop was attended by more than 100 prolific researchers in this domain including both senior and junior faculty members at top business schools across the globe. The next year’s workshop will be organized by the Isenberg School of Management in spring of 2023.