Collaborative Research: Prices, Peers, and Perceptions: Field Experiments on Technology Adoption in the Context of Improved Cookstoves

在许多情况下，采用可能改善福利的技术的情况仍然少得令人沮丧。改进的炉灶就是一个很好的例子：虽然燃烧更清洁的炉灶技术具有潜在的健康、环境和社会效益，但传播这些技术的努力却远远不够，在许多发展中国家，用生物质明火做饭的做法仍然占主导地位。这项建议的中心目标是研究经济激励（“价格”），社会学习（“同行”）和主观信念（“感知”）如何相互作用，以影响技术采用动态。我们通过一项实地试验来做到这一点，向与已经获得炉灶的家庭有社会联系和没有社会联系的家庭群体提供不同价格水平的新炉灶。我们的研究结果将为未来向更大的人群传播福利增强技术的努力提供信息。我们的家庭技术采用和使用决策的概念模型强调了价格，同伴和感知之间的多种潜在相互作用。 将通过我们的实验解决的关键研究问题包括价格如何影响感知质量的新技术，这些看法是如何修改的暴露给同行的技术经验，以及如何随着时间的推移，根据自己的经验和（客观和主观）的技术性能的看法改变。我们实施了一种新的识别策略，以确定这些影响，使用预先存在的和外源控制的免费炉灶的分布相结合，不相关的，集群随机分配到不同的炉灶补贴水平。通过明确测量感知与实验中的其他结果变量（包括调查和炉灶使用的物理指标以及对个人暴露于污染物的影响），研究人员将能够测试关于价格和同行（先前采用在信念形成中相互作用）的特定模型，这是技术采用文献中的关键问题。

Adoption of potentially welfare-improving technologies remains frustratingly low in many contexts. Improved cookstoves are a prime example: while cleaner-burning stove technologies have potential health, environmental, and social benefits, efforts to disseminate these technologies have fallen short and the practice of cooking with biomass over open fires remains dominant throughout much of the developing world. The central aim of this proposal is to study how economic incentives ("prices"), social learning ("peers"), and subjective beliefs ("perceptions") interact to influence technology adoption dynamics. We do so through a field experiment that offers new stoves at different price levels to groups of households with and without social ties to households that have already received stoves. Our results will inform and future efforts to disseminate welfare-enhancing technologies to larger population groups.Our conceptual model of households' technology adoption and use decisions highlights multiple potential interactions among prices, peers, and perceptions. Key research questions that will be addressed through our experiments include how price affects perceived quality of a new technology, how these perceptions are modified by exposure to peers that have experience with the technology, and how perceptions change over time based on one's own experience and (objective and subjective) technology performance. We implement a novel identification strategy for identifying these effects, using the preexisting and exogenously controlled distribution of free stoves in combination with uncorrelated, cluster-randomized assignment to different stove subsidy levels. By explicitly measuring perceptions in conjunction with other outcome variables in the experiment (including both surveys and physical indicators of stove use and impacts on personal exposure to pollutants), the researchers will be able to test specific models about how prices and peers (prior adoption interact in belief formation) a key issue in the technology adoption literature.