Dr. Tara Mitchell
Assistant Professor, Economics

Projects

• Title
  • Middlemen, Bargaining and Price Information: Is Knowledge Power?
• Summary
  • This paper investigates an important channel through which improved access to market information could increase the prices that producers receive from middlemen. I develop a theoretical model of trade between a farmer and a middleman which allows for the existence of different types of middlemen. The source of heterogeneity is attitudes towards fairness. I provide an empirical test of the theory from an original framed field experiment carried out with farmers and middlemen in India. The model predicts that there will be a non-monotonic relationship between the benefit of information and the cost of switching to a new middleman. The results of the experiment support the predictions of the model and demonstrate that actual middlemen differ in their attitudes towards fairness, middlemen make higher offers when the farmer is informed, and the benefit of information to the farmer varies with the cost of switching.
• Funding Agency
  • STICERD, LSE

• Title
  • Quality Observability and Vertical Integration in Supply Chains
• Summary
  • This paper presents a model of a supply chain for a good involving two stages of production. Effort must be exerted at both stages if a high-quality good is to be produced. Effort is not observable and the quality of the good is not perfectly observable. The model predicts that there will be a range of values of the price difference between high-quality and low-quality goods for which production of high-quality goods will occur with vertical integration but will not occur if the tasks are carried out by separate agents. The range of price values for which this occurs will be decreasing as the level of observability of quality increases and will disappear as quality becomes perfectly observable. The paper also presents some case studies of supply chains for various products in a number of developing countries that have characteristics which are consistent with the predictions of the model.

• Title
  • A Cross-Country Analysis of the Diffusion of Information and Communications Technology
• Summary
  • In this paper, I use a logistic model of technology diffusion to investigate the relationship between rates of mobile phone and Internet use and a number of geographic, institutional and economic variables, in a sample of 164 countries from 1990 to 2009. The aim of this paper is to identify the main characteristics of countries that have had success in adopting these new technologies in order to give us some insight into the barriers which may be faced by those countries which have been less successful.