Benjamin Roth is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This project explores the theory that the lack of price competition between vendors, and the subsequent oversupply of vendors, is caused by collusion and under-experimentation.
What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market?
We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 69% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%.
Rigol and Roth (2016) report results from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India in which they test the viability of two kinds of monetary payment rules used to incentivize truth-telling: a novel payment rule that relies on ex-post verification of reports and pee