Entrepreneurs of emotions: evidence from street vending in India

Ronak Jain

No 451, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Street vending is an important source of self-employment for the urban poor. I combine observational, survey, and experimental data from Delhi to study this market. Partnering with vendors to randomize prices and passersby they solicit, I find that even with identical goods, child vendors are 97% more likely to make a sale and earn 2x more than adult vendors. Despite no differences in valuations, couples and women are 90% and 28% more likely to buy than men and they are targeted more often and quoted higher prices. I show that sellers strategically leverage insights about social preferences to influence buyer decision-making.

Keywords: Social preferences; child labor; price discrimination; consumer behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 J46 L10 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ipr and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/262347/1/econwp451.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zur:econwp:451

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().