Skip to content

Busara

Busara Main Logo
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
More About Busara
  • External publication

Market Convergence and Equlibrium in a Kenyan Informal Settlement.

Download PDF

Johannes Haushofer & Noémie Zurlinden

  • September 16, 2013
  • 8:25 am

SECTOR

Behavioral Research and Academic Engagements

PROJECT TYPE

Lab experiment

DOI

Location

East and Southern Africa

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Experimental market
OVERVIEW

The economies of developing countries are often characterized by market failures, but the causes of these inefficiencies remain incompletely understood. Here we use an experimental approach to study market interactions in a developing country from first principles. In particular, we ask whether basic predictions of neoclassical price theory hold in a simple market with participants from an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. In developed countries, neoclassical price theory has been shown to accurately predict convergence and equilibrium in such markets. We use a classic double auction design, in which sellers set a price and buyers make a purchasing decision.

THEMATIC AREAS

All sellers have the same reservation price, and all buyers have the same, higher reservation price, creating a surplus. Since sellers have unlimited supply and buyers freely choose from which seller to buy, the predicted equilibrium transaction price is the sellers’ marginal cost. We find that both offer and transaction prices converge rapidly to the theoretically predicted equilibrium. We find evidence for learning-by-doing, in that sellers learn to optimally set prices in the first few rounds of the game. In addition, we find evidence for learning-by-observing: when buyers switch into the role of sellers, they set prices optimally from the very first round. Optimal behavior, and thus profits, are strongly correlated with cognitive skills, especially mathematical ability. Together, these results suggest that neoclassical price theory accurately predicts basic market interactions in developing countries.

RELATED CONTENT

Stress and Temporal Discounting: Do Domains Matter?

August 2, 2020

How Soon Is Now? Evidence of Present Bias from Convex Time Budget Experiments

August 2, 2020

Measuring Self-Efficacy, Executive Function and Temporal Discounting in Kenya

August 2, 2020

Risky Choices and Solidarity: Why Experimental Design Matters

August 2, 2020
1 2 3 … 5 Next »
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
Facebook Linkedin Twitter Instagram
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
We are proud to be a member of

© 2025 Busara | Privacy Policy

Scroll to Top
Manage Cookies

To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. 

Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}