Yuly Arboleda, Santiago Arango-Aramburo. 2019. Effects of Wholesale Competition in Supply Chains: An Analysis with Heterogeneous Decision-Makers.  In: Villa S., Urrea G., Castañeda J., Larsen E. (eds) Decision-making in Humanitarian Operations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Print ISBN 978-3-319-91508-1

Online ISBN 978-3-319-91509-8

Commodity price cycles can arise when there is a tendency to invest more (less) when current prices are high (low). Traditionally this behavior is interpreted as based upon naïve expectations. However, weak financial institutions can also cause this behavior. When borrowing is hard and saving is risky farmers cannot invest

We analyze whether the decisions made by university students in a framed threshold public good game meet what artisanal gold miners decided in a lab-in-the-field experiment. This work contrasts with current literature in which the comparison between lab and lab-in-the-field has considered context-free situations. In general, we find more behavioral convergences than divergences between students and miners. Similar to a set previous literature, these results show lab experiments on social dilemmas can be externally valid.

We study post-harvest decisions among Tanzanian rice farmers. Risk and time preference experiments are used to understand post-harvest decisions. In particular, we investigate storage and processing decisions, which according to our study can increase income by more than 50 per cent, but also introduce risk and time delays. Experimentally elicited risk and time preferences are statistically significant in explaining these post-harvest decisions. Impatient farmers are less likely to store paddy, and risk-averse farmers are less likely both to process and store paddy for future sales.

Response time is a possible indicator of the cognitive processes employed by choice experiment participants when making choices. The decision-making literature suggests a positive correlation between slower response time and rational thinking, which is consistent with standard theories of decision-making. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between response time and respondents’ choices. We disentangle preference and willingness-to-pay estimates and explore whether response time sheds light on these aspects.

Policymakers have little experience regarding designing the right levels of pricing for plastic bags. Prices for bags are generally set low and are largely a symbolic reminder to consumers of the environmental concerns attributed to plastic bag use. The ineffectiveness of charging for bags in the long term, in countries such as South Africa, makes it imperative that we map the demand curve. Getting the price “right” depends on the size of the externality. Charging for plastic bags is therefore an effective nudging policy.