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Abstract It remains a puzzle how collective decisions upon private information are made in households and communities in developing countries. Recent evidence points to the interplay of social roles and individual incentives to transmit information. In the spirit of Akerlof (1970), this paper proposes a framework to understand three essential aspects of information aggregation, when there are information asymmetries between individuals under social conventions: (1) acquisition of attributes (e.g. skills); (2) efforts in information transmission (e.g. communication); and (3) resulting flow of information. The framework rationalizes mixed results in the literature, and highlights the tradeoffs in different approaches to informational interventions. Within the context of a school-based agricultural education program in Liberia that aims to empower students as agents of knowledge diffusion, I design a household-level experiment to study intergenerational information flow. The experiment (1) tests the existence of information asymmetries in crucial decisions; and (2) contrasts different approaches that induce information transmission in students' households and communities. This experiment is embedded in the context of a general randomized evaluation of the program (AEARCTR-0006671). It remains a puzzle how collective decisions upon private information are made in households and communities in developing countries. Recent evidence points to the interplay of social roles and individual incentives to transmit information. In the spirit of Akerlof (1970), this paper proposes a framework to understand three essential aspects of information aggregation, when there are information asymmetries between individuals under social conventions: (1) acquisition of attributes (e.g. skills); (2) efforts in information transmission (e.g. communication); and (3) resulting flow of information. The framework rationalizes mixed results about the efficiencies in achieving societal and household-level objectives, and highlights the tradeoffs in different approaches to informational interventions taking into account the possibilities of miscoordination among agents. Within the context of a school-based agricultural education program in Liberia that aims to empower students as agents of knowledge diffusion, I design a household-level experiment to study intergenerational information flow. The experiment (1) tests the existence of information asymmetries in crucial decisions; and (2) contrasts different approaches that induce information transmission in students' households and communities. This experiment is embedded in the context of a general randomized evaluation of the program (AEARCTR-0006671).
Last Published August 13, 2021 07:24 AM August 15, 2021 09:19 PM
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