000			01626nam a22001457a 4500
999			_c521119 _d521119
008			221215b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aAlem, Yonas and Dugoua, Eugenie _936258
245			_aLearning from unincentivized and incentivized communication: A randomized controlled trial in India
260			_aEconomic Development and Cultural Change
300			_a71(1), Oct, 2022: p.1-38
520			_aInteractions among peers of the same social network play significant roles in facilitating the adoption and diffusion of modern technologies in poor communities. We conduct a large-scale randomized controlled trial in rural India to identify the impact of information from friends on willingness to pay (WTP) for high-quality and multipurpose solar lanterns. We offered solar lanterns to seed households from 200 nonelectrified villages and randomly assigned three of their friends to two communication treatments (unincentivized and incentivized) that led to different exposures to their seed friend. We also introduce a second treatment to investigate whether the seed’s gender impacts the magnitude of peer effects. We show that unincentivized communication increases WTP for solar lanterns by 90% and incentivized communication by 145%, but gender does not seem to matter. We also show that learning from others is the mechanism that drives the increase in WTP. Our findings have significant implications for policies that aim at promoting the diffusion of new technologies in developing countries. – Reproduced
773			_aEconomic Development and Cultural Change
906			_aCOMMUNICATION
942			_cAR