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Tuesday, October 12th 2021

Benjamin Ouvrard (GAEL - INRAE) will present "Distributive justice in the field: How Indian farmers share water?"

Abstract:

We propose a framed-field experiment to understand how Indian farmers share water and to assess whether or not it is possible to induce them to share it more efficiently, using a gain and a loss framing. Farmers play a dictator game behind a veil of ignorance in which they decide the quantity of water to allocate between two farmers. We vary the equity/efficiency trade-off introducing a heterogeneity between farmers' productivity (most productive farmer located upstream or downstream). We are able to characterize most farmers behaviors: very few of them play as pro fit maximizers and, instead, adopt efficient or egalitarian (in quantity or in payoff s) behaviors. We show that the loss framing can induce farmers to share efficiently the water resource, but only when the most productive farmer is located downstream. On the contrary, we find mild evidence that farmers choose less often the efficient solution with the gain framing.