Is IT Enough? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India’s Agriculture Markets
利用印度短信服务RML的数据和2010年短信禁令这一自然实验，发现提供每日价格信息能额外降低农产品地理价格离散度12%，并加速价格收敛，对发展组织和信息提供者有启示。
Access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phone networks is widely known to improve market efficiency. In this paper, we examine whether access to timely and accurate information provided through ICT applications has any additional impact. Using a detailed data set from Reuters Market Light (RML), a text message service in India that provides daily price information to market participants, we find that this information reduces the geographic price dispersion of crops in rural communities by an average of 12%, over and above access to mobile phone technology and other means of communication. To identify the effect of information on price dispersion, we exploit a natural experiment where bulk text messages were banned unexpectedly across India for 12 days in 2010. We find that besides reducing geographic price dispersion, RML also increases the rate at which prices converge across India over time. We discuss the implications of this for development organizations and information providers. This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.