Price information, inter-village networks, and “bargaining spillovers”: Experimental evidence from Ghana

Through a randomized experiment and detailed data on inter-village communication, we identify the impact of providing commodity price information to smallholder farmers. For yam, a crop with high prevalence of bargaining, the intervention leads to a 9% increase in the prices received by farmers in the treatment group in the first year and possibly to mixed indirect effects in the second year in areas with high density of treatment. While control farmers do not gain price information, we speculate that bargaining spillovers might lead to indirect benefits and capture this intuition in a formal model. The intervention has no impact on other crops grown in the area, which are characterized by different market structures and lower incidence of bargaining. The results expand our understanding of the market structure characteristics that affect the effectiveness of ICT interventions and highlight the importance of considering longer-run inter-village spillover effects. •We deliver price information to smallholder farmers in remote areas of Ghana.•In the first year the impact on prices is significant for yam, a crop for which bargaining is prevalent.•We find no evidence of an impact for other crops with lower prevalence of bargaining.•We propose a formal model of bargaining which can explain the empirical findings.