Farmers' Information Management in Developing Countries—A Highly Asymmetric Information Structure
研究了发展中国家农民在高度不对称信息结构下的信息管理与利用问题，构建了二分图模型并求解贝叶斯纳什均衡，分析了政府最优信息分配策略以最大化农民总利润或社会福利。
In developing countries, governments, non‐governmental organizations, and social entrepreneurs are disseminating agricultural information to farmers to improve their welfare. However, instead of having direct access to the information, farmers usually acquire information from local social networks, and, thus, they may have very different information channels. We establish a general framework that accommodates highly asymmetric information structures to study farmers' information management and utilization problems. In our model, a bipartite graph describes which subset of signals is accessible to a farmer. We characterize a unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium and express farmers' strategies and expected profits in closed form. We discuss properties of this equilibrium and show that asymmetric information structures can lead to various novel results. For example, a farmer may produce more (less) when observing a pessimistic (optimistic) signal, may benefit from the improvement of a signal she cannot observe, may want to share her signal with others, and may become worse off when another farmer releases a signal to her. We conduct comprehensive studies on the equilibrium in the “weak signal limit,” where signals are subject to substantial noise. We examine the government's optimal information allocation in this limit when its goal is to maximize farmers' total profits or the social welfare. To improve farmers' total profits, the government should provide all its information to (and only to) one farmer. We establish an index to determine which farmer should get the information. In contrast, to maximize the social welfare, the government should provide all its information to all farmers.