Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers

Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee, Maximo Torero and Sujata Visaria
Additional contact information
Sandip Mitra: Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
Sujata Visaria: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sujata Visaria and Sujata Visaria

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018, vol. 100, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: West Bengal potato farmers cannot directly access wholesale markets and do not knowwholesale prices. Local middlemen earn large margins; pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices is negligible. When we informed farmers in randomly chosen villages about wholesale prices, average farmgate sales and prices were unaffected, but pass-through to farmgate prices increased. These results can be explained by a model where farmers bargain ex post with village middlemen, with the outside option of selling to middlemen outside the village. They are inconsistent with standard oligopolistic models of pass-through, search frictions, or risk-sharing contracts.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00699 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers (2016)
Working Paper: Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers (2015)
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:tpr:restat:v:100:y:2018:i:1:p:1-13

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().