Experimental auctions have not been widely used in Africa. However, auctions are important tools for evaluating new products and technologies. To increase the quality of these experiments, we explore an alternative first-price bidding mechanism that is more similar to African market exchanges...

The maize green revolution, which increased maize yields through the use of improved varieties and fertilizer, has stalled since the mid-eighties in Kenya. This paper examines whether the stagnation of yields continued in the 1990s in spite of the implementation of the maize liberalization...

Using the Bhutan Living Standard Survey (BLSS) data for the year 2007, this paper attempts to identify and analyze the factors that are likely to influence household decisions when choosing a particular energy source for various uses such as lighting, cooking, and heating. A multinomial logit...

The simple neo-classical household model presents a major problem - the cooperative unique household utility function might not always be appropriate. More specifically, women's and men's utility functions might be different. To accomodate the problem, this paper explores the possibility of an...

In this paper we assess (a) consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a recently developed variety of maize that is high in provitamin A in the context of a public health intervention and (b) the performance of three elicitation mechanisms in estimating WTP in a field experiment in Ghana....

"Biofortification is increasingly seen as an additional tool to combat micronutrient malnutrition. This paper presents, for the first time, evidence on the costs and potential benefits of biofortification for a large number of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We use a modification of...

Maize is the major food crop and an important cash crop in East Africa, but yields have not increased in the last years. Maize prices fluctuate heavily both over time, causing price insecurity which hampers investment decisions, and over space which, combined with limited knowledge of that...

Commissioned by the CGIAR Science Council and prepared as a Background Paper for the 2008 World Development Report of the World Bank.