Improving Farmers’ Income on Online Agri-platforms: Evidence from the Field

32 Pages Posted: 26 Nov 2019 Last revised: 12 Dec 2023

See all articles by Retsef Levi

Retsef Levi

MIT Sloan School of Management - Operations Research Center

Manoj Rajan

Rashtriya e Market Services

Somya Singhvi

USC Marshall School of Business

Yanchong Zheng

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Operations Research Center

Date Written: September 7, 2022

Abstract

To improve the welfare of smallholder farmers, multiple countries (e.g., Ethiopia and India) have launched online agri-platforms to transform traditional markets. However, there is still mixed evidence regarding the impact of these platforms and more generally how they can be leveraged to enable more efficient agricultural supply chains and markets. This paper describes work conducted in close collaboration with the state government of Karnataka, India, to design, implement, and assess the impact of a new two-stage auction on the state's online agri-platform, the United Market Platform (UMP). To ensure implementability and protect farmers' revenue, the auction design is guided by practical operational considerations as well as semi-structured interviews with a majority of the traders in the field. A new behavioral auction model informed by the field insights is developed to determine when the proposed two-stage auction can generate a higher revenue for farmers than the traditional single-stage, first-price, sealed-bid auction. The new auction mechanism was implemented on the UMP for a major market of lentils in February 2019. By the end of May 2019, commodities worth more than $6 million (USD) had been traded under the new auction. A difference-in-differences analysis demonstrates that the implementation has yielded a significant 3.6% price increase (corresponding to a 55%--94% profit gain), benefiting over 10,000 farmers who traded in the treatment market. The results from this paper offer tangible lessons on how innovative price discovery mechanisms could be enabled by online agri-platforms in resource-constrained environments. Importantly, the success of these designs critically depends on careful considerations of systemic operational and behavioral factors that affect trades in the physical markets.

Keywords: Poverty alleviation, smallholder farmers, two-stage auction, field implementation, developing countries, difference-in-differences, multi-method, behavioral operations, anticipated regret, level-k thinking

Suggested Citation

Levi, Retsef and Rajan, Manoj and Singhvi, Somya and Zheng, Yanchong, Improving Farmers’ Income on Online Agri-platforms: Evidence from the Field (September 7, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3486623 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3486623

Retsef Levi

MIT Sloan School of Management - Operations Research Center ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

Manoj Rajan

Rashtriya e Market Services ( email )

Karnataka State Agricultural Marketing Board
2nd Raj Bhavan Road
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560001
India

Somya Singhvi

USC Marshall School of Business ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
United States

Yanchong Zheng (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Operations Research Center ( email )

77 Massachusetts Avenue
Bldg. E 40-149
Cambridge, MA 02139
United States

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