Intervention(s)
The study focuses on prices, purchases, and sales of four target products: onions, bananas, cooking oil, and water. The sample of retailers and suppliers are screened to sell one or more of the four target products. The study will survey roughly 850 retailers, and also suppliers in the locations where the retailers source their inventory. Each group (retailers and suppliers) will be surveyed in person, then contacted again by phone every two weeks to construct panel data on their prices and other data. The first round of the supplier panel will collect price quotes from suppliers that will be used in the intervention.
The retailers are divided into two treatment groups (T1 and T2) and a control group (C). The control group will receive only a suggestion that the most profitable retailers actively search for low-cost suppliers. T1 will receive the same general suggestion, and also general information about the distribution of prices. Specifically, this group will be given a flier that shows the quartiles of the distribution of price quotes, and an explanation of what the quartiles mean (e.g. 25% of retailers charge less than X). T2 will receive specific price quotes from relatively low cost suppliers: the exact price and the contact information of the supplier.
The study will measure impacts using two sources of data: the phone-based panel survey (which will run for 4 rounds, with the intervention beginning in Round 2), and expenditures from an inventory grant. The grant will be given to all retailers in all three groups, and paid as a reimbursement based on receipts that record the supplier as well as prices and quantities for all goods purchased. Enumerators will record these data to use as an additional dataset for measuring impacts.