Zilberman modeled diffusion as a result of economic choices by heterogeneous decision makers affected by dynamic processes.

The survey by Sunding and Zilberman (2001),[11] views technological innovations as outcomes of multistage activities (research, development, commercialization, marketing, adoption) affected by economic incentives.

They suggest that studies of adoption should explicitly analyze the impact of marketing efforts including, advertisement, money back guarantee, sampling and demonstration.

Graff, Heiman and Zilberman (2002)[12] emphasize the important role of the educational industrial complex in introducing modern innovations.

Zilberman, Kaplan, and Wesseler (2015)[14] tried to understand the welfare loss associated with delayed adoption of GM technologies due to regulatory barriers.

This analysis contributed to understanding welfare implications of lack of GM adoption around the world, using simple economic tools and assumptions about yield effects.

Zilberman, D., M. Khanna, and L. Lipper (1997),[17] Khanna and Zilberman (2001)[18] extended the notion of water use efficiency for studying the incentives for adoption of modern irrigation technologies to thinking more broadly about technologies that can increase input-use efficiency in a range of other contexts and the economic incentives and barriers to their widespread adoption.

A key contribution of this work was to show how policy distortions can reduce incentives to adopt technologies that are otherwise economically efficient and environmentally preferred.

The article found that this setup optimally results in a spatial pattern of worse "local pollution" and lower usage of the disposal system for waste producers farther away from the central facility.

These works explore theoretically counter-intuitive, practically relevant implications on infrastructure investment, consumption efficiency, and conservation of water and other resources.

The damage control function has had a wide range of applications, including assessing the impact of GMOs, and is reviewed in Sexton, Lei and Zilberman (2007).

[24] Wu, Zilberman and Babcock,(2001)[25] developed a conceptual framework to allocate a public fund that is paying producers to utilize lands or other resources in activities that benefit the environment.

The article argues that the legislation has not adjusted to recent changes in the structure of livestock production systems, in particular contract farming and industrialization of agriculture.

The paper proposes policy reforms that increase liability of large agribusiness firms, also known as integrators, for the negative environmental side effects caused by their producers’ livestock operations.

Ronald Coase famously won the Nobel prize for his work claiming that a competitive system with well-defined property right assignments, perfect information, and zero transaction costs would attain Pareto optimality through a process of voluntary bargaining and side payments.

This paper investigates this claim in the context of a stochastic externality problem and finds that, when at least one agent is risk averse, optimal outcomes are not independent of the initial assignment of property rights.

Analytic results show that the potential economic gains from tagging will depend critically on the quality of existing capital, the degree of returns to scale in treatment technologies, and the size and sensitivity of the vulnerable population.

The real options framework has since been applied to natural resource management and restoration that account for resource conserving technological changes in the future (Zhao and Zilberman, 2001[34]), to money back guarantees where learning about product quality and fit occurs after purchases have been made (Heiman et al., 2002[35]), and technology adoption and adaptation to climate change where irreversibility plays a critical role (Zilberman, Zhao and Heiman, 2012[36]).

Generally, new supply chains tend to take advantage of market power and evolve over time as they expand over space and encounter competition.

Du et al. (2016)[38] and Lu, Reardon, and Zilberman (2017)[39] present a conceptual framework depicting the issues and strategies of a firm with an innovation (in product or technology or system).

He is an active advocate of agricultural biotechnology, engaging in public debates on issues surrounding genetically modified technologies and intellectual property.