Using Individual-Level Randomized Treatment to Learn about Market Structure

• Tác giả: Lorenzo Casaburi
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 001.43 Historical, descriptive, experimental methods
• Thông tin xuất bản: American Economic Association, 2023
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 320084
• Chủ đề: 1. ALTERNATIVE ESTIMATION; 2. EFFECTIVE PRICES; 3. MEASURING COCOA QUALITY; 4. RANDOMISED CONTROL TRIALS; 5. RCT

Tóm tắt

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers in Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences in prices and quantities purchased from farmers through a model of Cournot competition reveals differentiation between traders is low. Combining this result with quasi-experimental variation in world prices shows that the number of traders competing is 50 percent higher than the number operating in a village. Own-price and cross-price supply elasticities are high. Farmers face a competitive market in this first stage of the value chain.