Economics Research Seminar – Professor Lore Vandewalle

Economics Research Seminar – Professor Lore Vandewalle

Title: Customer Knowledge and the Price-Quality Gradient with Julia Cajal-Grossi and Chris Woodruff

Date: 20 November 2024

Time: 13:30 – 14:30

Venue: NUBS.4.23

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

Customer Knowledge and the Price-Quality Gradient with Julia Cajal-Grossi and Chris Woodruff

Speaker:  Professor Lore Vandewalle

Lore Vandewalle is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the Graduate Institute, where she holds the Pictet Chair for Finance and Development. Previously, she was a part-time senior researcher at the University of Oslo. Professor Vandewalle obtained her PhD from the University of Namur in Belgium in 2011. Before joining the Graduate Institute in September 2012, she was employed as a researcher at Bocconi University, the London School of Economics and the University of Gottingen. Since 2020, Lore Vandewalle is affiliated with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Lore Vandewalle is an applied micro-economist, specialised in development and political economics. Her research mainly focuses on financial inclusion and micro-enterprise development in India, Bangladesh and Uganda. She has also been working on political reservations and public good provision in India.

 Abstract:

How can firms in low-income countries be incentivized to upgrade quality? One pathway is providing access to foreign customers with a higher income, a demand for quality, and access to information about achieving such quality. However, this route is only available to a small fraction of firms in low-income countries. As income levels and preferences are hard to treat at scale, improving the “savviness” of domestic customers becomes the only policy instrument to change the demand for quality provision. Armstrong and Chen (2009) show theoretically that boosting the share of savvy consumers can increase aggregate quality, producer surplus, and overall welfare. We conducted a framed field experiment in Uganda, showing that a simple information-provision intervention can indeed improve the ability of consumers to discern quality.