Free Event

Price CSI Social Innovation Seminar

Speaker:
Arman Rezaee

RSVP to fewox@usc.edu for lunch and location.

Description: We develop and implement a novel, mobile phone-based information clearinghouse, and experimentally evaluate its ability to overcome information asymmetries and improve public service delivery to farmers in Punjab, Pakistan. Like many crowdsourcing websites, our clearinghouse collects and disseminates ratings---here, on the success of government veterinarians in inseminating livestock. We find that, compared to control, farmers receiving ratings enjoy 27 percent higher insemination success. This effect is entirely due to increased veterinarian effort, rather than farmers switching veterinarians. Treatment farmers are also 33 percent more likely to return to a government veterinarian rather than seeking a private provider. These results suggest large welfare benefits from a low-cost information intervention, which holds out hope for improved government accountability for the poor using basic mobile technology.

Bio: Arman’s research seeks to understand how to improve government services in fragile states. He focuses in particular on rural settings, where the majority of the world’s population lives and where government services suffer from low employee effort. In his job market paper, he shows that cost-effective, self-sustaining, and scalable crowd-sourcing technology can be harnessed to improve government performance in Pakistan and subsequently, the welfare of rural Pakistanis. He is also interested in how personality traits of government employees matter for efforts to improve government services through increased transparency, as well as how governments decide where to offer services in the first place. Arman is currently an Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of California, Davis.

Sponsored by:
Sol Price Center for Social Innovation

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