Cheap Talk and Coordination in the Lab and in the Field: Collective Commercialization in Senegal

Kodjo Aflagah, Tanguy Bernard and Angelino Viceisza
Additional contact information
Kodjo Aflagah: UMD - University of Maryland [College Park] - University System of Maryland

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Most developing-country farms are small and engage in cooperative agriculture. Prior literature has argued that mechanisms aimed at facilitating smallholder coordination such as cooperatives are central to stimulating market participation. At the same time, cooperatives have not always been able to engage in collective action. In this paper, we conduct neutrally framed coordination games and a natural field experiment to test the effect of cheap talk among members of groundnut-producing cooperatives in Senegal. In both experiments, we ask farmers how much they intend to contribute to the group prior to them actually doing so and then, confidentially reveal aggregate intentions to other cooperative members. Based on survey and administrative data, we find that (1) revealing farmers' intentions improves collective commercialization and this effect increases with group size and (2) learning in the lab transfers to behavior in the day-to-day environment. Implications for policy and future work are discussed.

Keywords: Cooperatives; Collective commercialization; Coordination; Cheap talk; Field experiments; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03564999v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Development Economics, 2022, 154, pp.102751. ⟨10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102751⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03564999v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cheap talk and coordination in the lab and in the field: Collective commercialization in Senegal (2022)
Working Paper: Cheap Talk and Coordination in the Lab and in the Field: Collective Commercialization in Senegal (2019)
Working Paper: Cheap Talk and Coordination in the Lab and in the Field: Collective Commercialization in Senegal (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03564999

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102751

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().