Experimental Design
The intervention targets a sample of farmers who sell their product to a local offtaker. The offtaker provided a list of farmers at the beginning of the study. The field team conducts confirmation calls to verify that the farmers have a basic relationship or experience with our partner and that they intend to sell their crop to the off-taker. We will specify our exclusion criteria below in more detail.
After the list of farmers is verified, the farmers on the verified list are mobilized to attend group meetings where a general introduction to insurance is provided. Farmers can additionally contact the local offtaker or call a toll-free center to ask any questions they may have. This step ensures that the farmers in our study have a good understanding of insurance terms in general.
During the data collection, each of the farmers will be reached individually to complete a baseline survey and receive a two-season insurance offer that entails paying the insurance premium via deduction from harvest time payments in each season. Specifically, farmers are given the choice to buy insurance (or not) for two seasons, and whether they would like to have the option to cancel the insurance after the first season. They are further asked whether they would like to have the cancellation option regardless of the outcome of the first season, or whether they would like to retain the cancellation option if they receive/ do not receive an insurance payout in the first season. All farmers are told that they will receive another phone call at the end of the first season during the insurance window for the second season.
The intervention consists of two treatment groups randomly assigned at the farmer level. The treatment group (T1) will receive an information treatment that guides farmers to think through farming activities and insurance demand in different scenarios when the current season is good or bad and discusses the associated pros and cons of the cancellation option in the insurance plan. Within the treatment group, we include a battery of manipulation check questions to explore mechanisms through which our treatment may be having an effect, and we randomize the order of treatment and manipulation checks. The control group (T0) will not receive the intervention or manipulation check questions.
Exclusion criteria: As mentioned above, we will only target farmers for the baseline survey if they have been verified. Specifically, in this verification process, we exclude farmer groups in which no farmer intends to sell in the next two seasons. This leaves about 500 farmers with whom we proceed to group meetings and the baseline survey (we do not expect to be able to reach all of them). In the baseline survey, we will again include questions asking whether each individual farmer has basic experience and relationships with their offtakers, and whether they intend to sell. We plan to conduct our main analysis on the full sample and on the subsample that includes only farmers who we expect to sell to offtakers, and those who have attended the group meeting.