Authors
Jessica B Hoel, Hope Michelson, Ben Norton, Victor Manyong
Publication date
2024/3/17
Journal
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
Publisher
Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Description
In many markets, consumers believe things about products that are not true. We study how incorrect beliefs about product quality can persist even after a consumer has used a product many times. We explore the example of fertilizer in East Africa. Farmers believe much local fertilizer is counterfeit or adulterated; however, multiple studies have established that nearly all fertilizer in the area is good quality. We develop a learning model to explain how these incorrect beliefs persist. We show that when the distributions of outcomes using good and bad quality products overlap, agents can misattribute bad luck or bad management to bad quality. Our learning model and its simulations show that the presence of misattribution inhibits learning about quality and that goods like fertilizer with unobservable quality that are inputs into production processes characterized by stochasticity should be thought of as credence goods …
Total citations
20212022202320242676
Scholar articles
JB Hoel, H Michelson, B Norton, V Manyong - Work. Pap., Colo. Coll., Colo. Springs. https://www …, 2022
JB Hoel, H Michelson, B Norton, V Manyong - American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2024