Increasing engagement in price crowdsourcing initiatives: using nudges in Nigeria

African agriculture is still to develop its full production potential. Among the multiple ways to achieve this, a better distribution of market signals to farmers and other market participants could help to take better-informed decisions, leading to increased income and capacity to invest. Therefore, increasing the availability of market information in Africa has become a priority. To do so alternative data sources and new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer enormous potential as a complement to classic official statistics. This has given rise to a number of ICTs and/or citizen science projects to monitor data in real-time and to several examples of food price crowdsourcing in Africa. However, one of the main challenges faced by crowdsourcing initiatives is the need to assure that individuals feed information into the system. In this paper, we test the potential of behavioural interventions to help sustain crowd contributions by leveraging intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivations. We evaluate whether the inclusion of two nudges, one based on social norms and one based on information disclosure, in the design of a crowdsourcing initiative for food price reporting enhance crowd engagement using two randomized control trials (RCTs). Our results show that social norms can increase crowd participation while information disclosure does not. The latter highlights the need for further research to identify which type of information might help sustaining the crowd efforts. These findings can be very helpful to design future crowdsourcing or other type of initiative that requires citizen engagement to be sustained over time.

SOLANO HERMOSILLA Gloria;  BARREIRO HURLE Jesus;  ADEWOPO Julius;  GORRIN GONZALEZ Celso; 

2022-02-08

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC120152

0305-750X (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22000080?via%3Dihub,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC120152,   

10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105818 (online),