Design of an Incentive Decision Method for an Agriculture Information Sharing System

In Japan, agriculture is facing a crisis due to the aging of farmers and the shortage of successors. In addition, there is much work in agriculture based on know-how that new farmers cannot get easily; therefore, some new farmers give up farming after a few years. Consequently, it is necessary to share the know-how with new farmers. However, it is difficult to positively share the know-how due to the difficulty of verbalizing the know-how. Therefore, it is necessary to provide the know-how providers with an incentive. 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 performances of our method are investigated by simulation experiments. Specifically, we verify that the method collects more high-quality know-how while giving a lower incentive. Our results indicate that the proposed method better performs compared to the other simple methods we assume in the experiments.