Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins : An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers

In the Indian state of West Bengal, potato farmers sell to local middlemen because they lack direct access to wholesale markets. In high-frequency farmer marketing surveys we find that farmers are poorly informed about wholesale and retail prices, and there is a large gap between wholesale and farmgate prices. To test alternative models of farmer-middlemen trades, we conduct a field experiment providing farmers in randomly chosen villages with market price information. Information provision had negligible average effects on farmgate sales and revenues, but increased pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices. The results are inconsistent with models of risk-sharing via contracts between middlemen and farmers. They are consistent with a model of ex post bargaining and sequential price competition between a cartel of village middlemen and a cartel of external middlemen