The prices of development. An ethnographic account of a randomized pricing experiment in East Africa

Nassima Abdelghafour

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024, vol. 17, issue 1, 92-107

Abstract: This article, based on ethnographic research, explores the material conditions of price realization, in the context of a poverty-reduction intervention implemented in rural areas of an East African country. It describes a pricing experiment conducted by development economists on people living in extreme poverty, with real money. Using pricing as an analytic prism, I discuss the politics of a market-based poverty-alleviation project. The goal of the experiment was to identify a price that ultra-poor, off-grid consumers would be willing to pay to acquire a solar light. It consisted of testing different prices simultaneously and led to a situation in which participants within the same village were offered to buy the same object at a randomized price. The paper details the operations through which prices were turned into experimental objects and analyses the consequences of the particular way in which prices were materialized. As a result of the experimental pricing process, prices were carefully detached from the solar lights for sale, and carefully attached to randomly selected people. I show that beyond testing the villagers’ ability to pay a given price, the experiment aims at testing their ability and stimulating their desire to behave as payers in general.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2272953

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