This case study concerns the technology choice of farmers in
the Pakistan Punjab with regard to wheat varieties. It argues that
profitability of new crop technologies can only partly explain their
adoption, as access to inputs limits the choice of farmers. In Pakistan,
access to inputs is limited due to market structures and associated
institutional factors. In applied microeconomics, technology choice is
commonly estimated with the use of adoption models: the (expected)
profitability of prevailing and the new technologies are compared, and
it is assumed that the farmers opt for the most profitable one (taking
account of risk aversion and incomplete information). A simplification
often made is to assume that everyone has unlimited access to all
relevant goods and services. In this paper the latter assumption is
tested. More specifically, the paper is concerned with the consequences
of limits due to the organisational infrastructure of
markets.