 Risk Sharing, Commitment and Information: An experimental analysisAbigail Barr and Garance Genicot No 2007-17, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Abstract: This paper describes and analyzes the results of a unique field experiment especially designed to test the effects of the level of commitment and information available to individuals when sharing risk. We find that limiting exogenously provided commitment is associated with less risk sharing, while limiting information on defections can be associated with more risk sharing. These results can be understood by distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and by recognizing that social sanctions are costly to inflict or that individuals suffer from time-inconsistent preferences. Comparing the groups formed within our experiment with the real life risk sharing networks in a few villages allows us to test the external validity of our experiment and suggests that the results are salient to our understanding of risk sharing arrangements observed in developing countries. Keywords: Field experiment; risk sharing; social sanctions; insurance; limited commitment; asymmetry of information (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2007-17 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
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