Identity, Interest and Information Search in Rural Ghana∗

This paper examines how farmers in rural Ghana search for information. We use data on farmer’s decisions to connect with other farmers when facing different problems to explore the role played by identity in constraining access to information. We show that farmers target different sub–sets of acquaintances when searching for different types of information, supporting the view that identity cannot be the main determinant of these decisions. ∗This is a much revised version of a paper that circulated under the title “Interest and Identity in Network Formation and Activation”. We thank J. S. Butler, Andrew Foster, Rachel Kranton, Chris Udry, and conference participants at the 2004 American Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting, the Pew Workshop on “Social Dynamics and the Microeconomics of Poverty” held in Bellagio in April 2005, the Graduate Seminar in Economic Development at Cornell University and the CSAE Research Workshop at the University of Oxford for comments that greatly improved previous versions of this paper. Santos thanks the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia for financial support and the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford for the hospitality during the last stages of writing this paper. Barrett thanks The Pew Charitable Trusts, through the Christian Scholars Program of the University of Notre Dame for financial support. The usual disclaimers apply. †Lecturer, Discipline of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Correspondence Address: 107 Watt Building, Science Road, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected] ‡Professor, Department of Applied Economics.