Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers
66 Pages Posted: 6 Aug 2015
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Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers
Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers
Date Written: August 4, 2015
Abstract
In the Indian state of West Bengal, potato farmers sell to local middlemen because they lack direct access to wholesale markets. In high-frequency farmer marketing surveys we find that farmers are poorly informed about wholesale and retail prices, and there is a large gap between wholesale and farmgate prices. To test alternative models of farmer-middlemen trades, we conduct a field experiment providing farmers in randomly chosen villages with market price information. Information provision had negligible average effects on farmgate sales and revenues, but increased pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices. The results are inconsistent with models of risk-sharing via contracts between middlemen and farmers. They are consistent with a model of ex post bargaining and sequential price competition between a cartel of village middlemen and a cartel of external middlemen.
Keywords: agricultural finance, middlemen, price competition, wholesale markets
JEL Classification: O12, L14
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