Survivor: Three principles of economics lessons as taught by a reality television show

The reality television show Survivor has been a ratings success on CBS for over 16 years. In the show, 16 strangers are marooned in a remote location, required to compete in physical and mental challenges and periodically vote to eliminate players from the game. The last person remaining wins one million dollars. The author uses this popular television show to demonstrate three important principles of microeconomics: (a) for individual decision-making, concepts like pride and honor may belong in the utility function, alongside more classical components such as consumption of goods and services; (b) considering how others will respond to your action is critical for good economic and strategic thinking; and (c) repeated interaction can help collusive behavior hold.     

List randomization for sensitive behavior: An application for measuring use of loan proceeds

Policymakers and microfinance institutions (MFIs) often claim to target poor entrepreneurs who then invest loan proceeds in their businesses. Typically in non-research settings these claims are assessed using readily available but unverified self-reports from client loan applications. Alternatively, independent surveyors could directly elicit how borrowers spent their loan proceeds. That too, however, could suffer from deliberate misreporting. We use data from the Peru and the Philippines in which independent surveyors elicited loan use both directly (i.e., by asking how individuals spent their loan proceeds) and indirectly (i.e., through a list-randomization technique that allows individuals to hide their answer from the surveyor). We find that direct elicitation under-reports the non-enterprise uses of loan proceeds.     

When curiosity kills the profits: An experimental examination

Economic theory predicts that in a first-price auction with equal and observable valuations, bidders earn zero profits. Theory also predicts that if valuations are not common knowledge, then since it is weakly dominated to bid your valuation, bidders will bid less and earn positive profits. Hence, rational players in an auction game should prefer less public information. We are perhaps more used to seeing these results in the equivalent Bertrand setting. In our experimental auction, we find that individuals without information on each other's valuations earn more profits than those with common knowledge. However, given a choice between the two sets of rules, approximately half the individuals preferred to have the public information. We discuss possible explanations, including showing that there is a correlation between ambiguity aversion and a preference for having more information in the auction.     

Crop Price Indemnified Loans for Farmers: A Pilot Experiment in Rural Ghana

Farmers face a particular set of risks that complicate the decision to borrow. We use a randomized experiment to investigate (1) the role of crop‐price risk in reducing demand for credit among farmers and (2) how risk mitigation changes farmers’ investment decisions. In Ghana, we offer farmers loans with an indemnity component that forgives 50 percent of the loan if crop prices drop below a threshold price. A control group is offered a standard loan product at the same interest rate. Loan uptake is high among all farmers and the indemnity component has little impact on uptake or other outcomes of interest.     

Finding Missing Markets (and a Disturbing Epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya

Farmers may grow crops for local consumption despite more profitable export options. DrumNet, a Kenyan NGO that helps small farmers adopt and market export crops, conducted a randomized trial to evaluate its impact. DrumNet services increased production of export crops and lowered marketing costs, leading to a 32% income gain for new adopters. The services collapsed one year later when the exporter stopped buying from DrumNet because farmers could not meet new EU production requirements. Farmers sold to other middlemen and defaulted on their loans from DrumNet. Such experiences may explain why farmers are less likely to adopt export crops.