Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Social Concerns Impede Price Competition Among Small Firms: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania.
I run a field experiment with 561 food retailers in urban Tanzania to answer three questions. First, do concerns about social sanctions reduce entrepreneurs’ willingness to undercut the prices of competitors? Second, how variable is the compensation required for firms to engage in such price competition? Third, when experimentally incentivized to undercut their competitor’s prices, do entrepreneurs update their beliefs about the social costs of competition? Treated firms are financially incentivized to sell maize flour at prices that undercut nearby competitors and must publicly post their selling price. My analysis leads to three main findings. First, firms are hesitant to undercut their competitors even when doing so is guaranteed to raise profits. At baseline, only 33% of retailers are willing to undercut others; unwilling retailers substantially overestimate the anger that others have towards undercutting. Second, firm beliefs about the severity of social sanctions vary widely. Among those that are willing to undercut, the required compensation varies from a 25 − 520% increase in their maize flour profit margin. Third, firms seem to learn via the experiment that social sanctions are less severe than they initially believed. After the first round, 33% more firms are willing to undercut others in a second round of treatment, and the subsidies they require are 30 − 39% smaller on average. These findings suggest that social concerns impede price competition among small firms, but that those concerns can be partially overcome with temporary experimentation.
Funding from Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL).
Presented at the 2025 Conference on Advances with Field Experiments (Chicago, IL), 2025 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Annual Meeting (Denver, CO), 2025 Strategy PhD Conference (Durham, NC), 2025 Conference on Management in Emerging Markets (Toronto, Canada), 2025 Midwest International Economic Development Conference (Urbana, IL), 2024 Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (Fontainebleau, France), and the Spring 2024 Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Technology Seminar (Ithaca, NY),
Misattribution Prevents Learning with Jessica B. Hoel, Hope Michelson, and Victor Manyong.
October 2024, American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
In many markets, consumers believe things about products that aren't true. We study how incorrect beliefs about product quality can persist even after a consumer has used a product many times. We explore the example of fertilizer in East Africa. Farmers believe much local fertilizer is counterfeit or adulterated; however, multiple studies have established that nearly all fertilizer in the area is good quality. We develop a learning model to explain how these incorrect beliefs persist. We show that when the distributions of outcomes using good- and bad-quality products overlap, agents can misattribute bad luck or bad management to bad quality. Our learning model and its simulations show that the presence of misattribution inhibits learning about quality, and that goods like fertilizer with unobservable quality that are inputs into production processes characterized by stochasticity should be thought of as credence goods, not experience goods. Our results suggest that policy makers should pursue quality assurance programs for products that are vulnerable to misattribution.
Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s Outstanding Master’s Thesis, 2021.
Funding from PEDL, the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois, and the Office of International Programs in the College of Agricultural, Environmental, and Consumer Sciences at the University of Illinois.
"Mark-ups and Entry in the Food Markets of a Large African City" with Brian Dillon, Ben Leyden, Todd Gerarden, and Joachim De Weerdt.
As African economies urbanize, food markets determine what people eat and how much they pay. To understand how these markets shape access and welfare, we conduct a census of the prices of four staple foods at 2,062 retailers in Mwanza, Tanzania and run a detailed survey with 434of these firms to understand their costs, stocking practices, pricing methods, relationships with customers, and information used about other firms. The resulting data set fully characterizes the distribution of food prices across locations, varieties, and purchase quantities, and provides an in depth view into how these retailers make stocking and pricing decisions. The data reveal two striking patterns: Bulk discounts are smaller than previously documented and vary widely across firms, with some even charging higher unit prices for larger purchases, and food prices vary sharply across neighborhoods despite the appearance of widespread competition and low barriers to entry for retail firms. These findings highlight how the structure of local competition shapes consumer well-being in rapidly changing economies.
Funding from Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG).
"Comparing Community-Based and Data-Driven Targeting Approaches for Humanitarian Assistance: Evidence from Southern Madagascar" with Joanna Upton, Kelsey Schreiber, Chandrakant Agme, and Annick Ravaka
Funding from Oxford Policy Management and the Data & Evidence to End Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Consortium.