Competition for Transparency

Last registered on November 21, 2025

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Competition for Transparency

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0015861

Initial registration date

May 30, 2025

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

June 04, 2025, 9:51 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated

November 21, 2025, 9:19 AM EST

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country

Ghana

Region

Eastern Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Rachel Pizatella-Haswell

Affiliation

University of California, Berkeley

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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Francis Annan

PI Affiliation

University of California, Berkeley

Contact Investigator

PI Name

Apoorv Gupta

PI Affiliation

Dartmouth College

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Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2025-01-13

End date

2026-04-30

Keywords

Finance & Microfinance, Firms & Productivity, Labor

Additional Keywords

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.

Abstract

A large body of economics research has examined the role of price transparency, evaluating a range of policies implemented across different countries and markets. Evidence suggests that more transparent markets can benefit both customers and agents by disciplining firms’ behavior, increase trust among counterparties, and generally improving market efficiency.

This raises a natural question: if transparency can benefit consumers, and to some extent firms, why don’t market forces alone lead agents to be more transparent? Several policy tools have been proposed to address this gap — including audits (Naritomi 2019), disrupting collusive norms (Banerjee, Frischer, Karlan, Lowe, and Roth 2023), promoting competition (Bergquist and Dirnstein 2020), and increasing reputational costs for opaque behavior (Annan 2024) — with the goal of shifting the market from a low-transparency equilibrium to a more transparent one. Lack of transparency is especially relevant, if not the defining feature, in the market for digital financial services (DFS) in developing countries. In these markets consumers often face hidden fees and complex pricing. Mobile money, in particular, is marked by shrouded attributes, opaque pricing, and low financial literacy, making it an ideal setting to study transparency-enhancing interventions.

This study seeks to understand how to incentivize mobile money agents to share information with customers through displaying official MTN mobile money tariffs. We test whether financial incentives, competition, or reputational motivations increase agents’ willingness to engage in transparent practices, using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) across 175 rural communities across Ghana. The project includes three treatments designed to foster competition for transparency among mobile money agents in eastern Ghana. Agents in the treatment arms receive tariff posters that accurately display transaction fees. Among those offered the posters, we test three types of incentives to actually display them: (1) financial rewards, (2) competitive pressure from neighboring agents, and (3) reputational incentives from customer feedback.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Annan, Francis, Apoorv Gupta and Rachel Pizatella-Haswell. 2025. "Competition for Transparency." AEA RCT Registry. November 21. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.15861-2.0

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

The intervention aims to incentivize tariff posting at mobile money agent locations through offering entrance into a lottery worth 200 GHS ($17 USD). Prominently displaying official mobile money tariffs at agent locations alerts customers to the correct amount they should be charging, creating a more transparent market. The intervention will be implemented in two stages. Stage one includes offering mobile money agents MTN tariff posters without incentives for posting

Stage 1
The first stage focuses purely on transparency, so the team will offer two treatments:
Treatment 1: The team will work with MTN to make tariff posters available to agents in select locations. MTN will notify these agents that they can pick up tariff posters at designated locations, likely near where agents collect e-float.

Pure control: The study will maintain a pure control group where agents are not offered the tariff poster.

Stage two includes incentivizing agents to post tariffs and includes three treatment arms: financial reward for posting tariffs, competition with other agents who post tariffs and customers who monitor agents' tariff posting.

Stage 2
Among the agents offered the tariff poster in stage one, we will offer incentives to mobile money agents and mobile money customers. Agents are entered into the lottery if they post information about official mobile money tariffs. Customers are entered into the lottery if they report on agents who fail to post information about official mobile money tariffs. The intervention includes three treatment arms:

Treatment 1: Treatment one invites 1 agent to participate in a lottery for 5 months. We select the agent randomly after the census of all agents in the market. For the 1 agent included in the lottery, auditors confirm that the agent is eligible for the lottery. If the agent posts tariffs he/she automatically wins the lottery. We select 1 lottery winner per market per month. The selected agent knows they are the only one in their area being treated and that they are guaranteed to win if compliant.

Treatment 2: Treatment two invites all agents to participate in a lottery for 5 months. Auditors confirm that agents are eligible for the lottery through random mystery shopping visits over the course of the study. We select 1 winner per market per month from the pool of eligible agents. We select 1 lottery winner per market per month. Agents know that other agents in the community are also eligible, and that only one will be selected per month.

Treatment 3: Treatment three invites both agents and customers to participate in a lottery for 5 months. Auditors confirm that agents are eligible for the lottery through random mystery shopping visits over the course of the study. Customers can enter the survey by sharing photos of mobile money agent locations and mobile money transaction receipts (if available). We select 1 winner per market per month from the pool of eligible agents and customers. We select 1 agent winner per market per month and 1 customer winner per market per month. Agents know that other agents in the community are also eligible, and that only one will be selected per month. The customer contest was described to agents as part of the intervention, meaning agents know that customers would also be monitoring them.

Tariff Control: This group will have been offered the tariff poster but will not be offered any incentives for posting.

Intervention Start Date

2025-04-01

Intervention End Date

2025-08-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

1. Transparency in tariff posting by agents

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Transparency captures the extent to which mobile money agents provide transparent pricing information to customers, either through visible tariff displays or verbal communication. Tariff posting is used as a proxy for transparency and information sharing between agents and customers. Measured using the following indicators:
• Tariff posting (audit): Whether an official tariff poster is visible at the agent location
• Verbal price disclosure (audit): Whether the agent verbally communicates the tariff unprompted
• Self-reported tariff posting (agent survey): Whether agents report displaying a tariff poster
• Customer-reported tariff posting (customer survey): Whether customers report seeing a posted tariff

Longitudinal measures:
• Whether the agent ever posts tariffs during the study period (based on any source)
• Duration or consistency of tariff posting (e.g., share of audit rounds with a posted tariff)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

1. Agent business outcomes
2. Improved customer experiences
3. Norms around transparency (defined as tariff posting) in the market

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Improved Business Outcomes captures whether the intervention led to improved operational and financial performance of mobile money agents. This is measured using the following indicators (all self-reported for the past 7 days unless noted):
- Number of paid workers employed (excluding the owner)
- Hours worked by the owner in the mobile money business
- Number of mobile money customers served
- Total number of mobile money transactions
- Total value of mobile money transactions (proxy for revenue)
- Weekly business income (profits)
- Monthly business income (profits)
- Value of inventory and raw materials (proxy for business capital)

Improved Customer Experience assesses whether the intervention improved the quality, transparency, and fairness of the mobile money transaction experience from the customer's perspective. This is measured using the following indicators (from audits and customer surveys:
- Transaction success rate
- Incidence of overcharging and value of overcharging
- Value of mobile money transaction attempted/completed

Market norms regarding transparency captures prevailing beliefs and expectations around tariff transparency from both the supply side (agents) and demand side (customers). It assesses the underlying market norms that may influence whether agents post tariffs and whether customers expect or value transparent pricing. Measured using the following indicators:
- Agent-reported reasons for not posting tariffs (agent survey)
- Customer demand for transparency – whether customers expect or ask agents to display or explain tariffs (customer survey)
- Customer valuation of transparency – whether customers consider transparent pricing important in their choice of agent (customer survey)

Experimental Design

To understand the mechanisms through which agents are incentivized to post mobile money tariffs, we compare tariff posting across treatment arms who received the tariff poster. Comparing tariff posting in treatment 1 to control explains the impact of financial incentives on tariff posting. We can measure the impact of competition incentives by testing the difference between treatment 2 and control to that between treatment 1 and control. Similarly, we can measure the impact of reputational incentives by testing the difference between treatment 3 and control to treatment 2 and control and treatment 1 and control.

To assess the downstream effects of tariff posting on quality of service and business outcomes, we compare agents in treatments who were incentivized to post tariffs to agents in the pure control and to agents who were not incentivized to post. We will pool the treatment arms together and examine the downstream impacts across treatment arms separately.

Experimental Design Details

Not available

Randomization Method

We will randomize the markets into five treatment arms: pure control, tariff control, treatment 1, treatment 2, and treatment 3. The randomization will be stratified by the following market-level characteristics:
Population size (above or below the sample median)
Number of agents (above or below the sample median)
Percentage of agents posting tariffs (above or below the sample median)

This results in a total of 8 strata (2 population groups × 2 agent groups × 2 tariff posting groups). Within each stratum, we randomly assign markets into the five treatment arms. Stratification and randomization are implemented in Stata

Randomization Unit

The PI team will conduct a two stage randomization. In stage one, we assign markets to one of 5 treatment arms. Treatment assignment is clustered at the market level, meaning all agents and customers in the same market receive the same treatment. In stage two, which only applies to treatment arm 1, we randomly select a “representative” agent who will automatically win the lottery if he/she posts tariffs.

Stage 1: We will randomize the markets into 5 treatment arms: pure control, tariff control, treatment 1, treatment 2 and treatment 3.

Stage 2: For treatment 1, only 1 agent per market will be invited to participate.

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes