Design and Evaluation of an Incentive Decision Method for an Agricultural Information Sharing System

Agriculture in Japan is facing a crisis due to the aging of farmers and a shortage of successors. In addition, much of agriculture depends on know-how that new farmers cannot easily obtain; therefore, new farmers often give up farming after a few years. Consequently, it is necessary to share agricultural know-how with new farmers. However, the difficulty in verbalizing this know-how poses a challenge in sharing it. Therefore, it is necessary to provide incentives to the providers of know-how. In this paper, we propose an incentive decision method using auto-negotiation while considering the intentions of the know-how providers. This method consists of agents that have utility functions, which express the intentions of farmers, and a service. The performance of our method is evaluated by simulation experiments. We verify that our method collects a large amount of high-quality know-how with low incentives. The results indicate that our proposed method performs better than the existing methods considered in the experiments.