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As a Team Or by a Tournament? Incentives for Information Learning Among Female Farmers in Rural Uganda
This paper studies how competitive versus team incentives compare in motivating smallholder female farmers in Uganda to learn and share information relevant to adopting a new agricultural technology (Vasilaky, 2013). We look at the tradeoff between maximizing the total amount of knowledge learned, without control over which specific facts are retained, to the ability to transmit very specific information with high reliability or probability of success. The task within our game is to learn and share agricultural information concerning cotton growing, within groups of female farmers. Participants shared information that they learned across three rounds: a round without incentives, a round with...
Farm Labor Productivity and the Effect of Mechanization
There is a chronic shortage of agricultural labor in the US. While growers are increasingly turning to guest-worker programs to meet their labor needs, few regard immigrant workers as a viable long-term solution. Further, many producers of labor-intensive agricultural commodities are considering mechanized solutions, the slow rate of adoption of mechanized harvesting equipment in the US remains an empirical puzzle. In this paper, we demonstrate that wage-setting farmers have an incentive to "over-mechanize," or employ more than the cost-minimizing level of capital when capital and labor are substitutes, but "under-mechanize" when labor and capital are technical complements. To test this theo...
Improving Smallholder Agriculture Via Video-Based Group Extension
Providing technical advice at scale poses operational challenges, particularly with respect to managing a sufficiently large staff. Technology may help, but risks reducing efficacy given reduced customization and human interaction. We tested a video added onto standard human-provided extension services promoting a climate-smart practice, System Rice Intensification in India. Using frequentist statistical methods, we find large but imprecisely estimated treatment effects: the 95% confidence interval is 10kgs to 500kgs and 717Rps to 9650Rps for output and profits, respectively. However, our data are not normally distributed: specifically, key outcomes have fat tails. A Bayesian hierarchical model finds smaller but more precise treatment effects: analogous 95% intervals from -8kgs to 70kgs and -193Rps to 1380Rps. We also test two messaging sub-treatments designed to address commonly cited constraints to adoption: labor needs and self-efficacy. A frequentist analysis shows no added gains, while the Bayesian shows an added benefit when delivered in tandem.
As Good as the Networks They Keep?
We examine an intervention randomized at the village level in which female farmers invited to a single training session were randomly paired with farmers whom they did not know and encouraged to share new agricultural information throughout the growing season for a recently adopted cash crop. We show that the intervention signi ficantly increased the productivity of all farmers except of those who were already in the highest quintile of productivity, and that there were signifi cant spillovers in productivity to male farmers.
Competition or Cooperation?
This study explores the behavioral learning characteristics of smallholder female farmers in Uganda by quantifying the amount of information learned under different incentive schemes. The paper shows how competitive versus team incentives compare in motivating Ugandan farmers to learn and share information relevant to adopting a new agricultural technology. We find that tournament-based incentives provide greater outcomes in terms of total information learned than threshold-based team incentives. Furthermore the order of the incentive - whether the tournament precedes or follows the team incentive scheme - does not affect the volume of information learned. New information introduced between rounds was learned by more individuals under team incentives than under tournament incentives. The study provides direct practical policy recommendations for improving learning in the context of agriculture in Uganda.
World Development Report 2019
Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need t...
World Development Report 1978
This first report deals with some of the major development issues confronting the developing countries and explores the relationship of the major trends in the international economy to them. It is designed to help clarify some of the linkages between the international economy and domestic strategies in the developing countries against the background of growing interdependence and increasing complexity in the world economy. It assesses the prospects for progress in accelerating growth and alleviating poverty, and identifies some of the major policy issues which will affect these prospects.
A Research Agenda for Experimental Economics
Written by well-established researchers in behavioural economics, this Research Agenda illustrates the application of incentivised decision-making experiments, highlighting how this can add a new and novel dimension to social science research. Informative and timely, it explores how experiments are being used by pioneers in a diverse range of fields when research questions may not be amenable to field studies, vignettes or surveys.
Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa
"The series is sponsored by the Agence Francaise de Developpement and the World Bank."
World Development Report 2013
Jobs provide higher earnings and better benefits as countries grow, but they are also a driver of development. Poverty falls as people work their way out of hardship and as jobs empowering women lead to greater investments in children. Efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do, as more productive jobs appear, and less productive ones disappear. Societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and social backgrounds and provide alternatives to conflict. Jobs are thus more than a byproduct of economic growth. They are transformational —they are what we earn, what we do, and even who we are. High unemployment and unmet job expectations among youth are th...
