Farmers’ Heterogeneous Valuation of Laser Land Leveling in Eastern Uttar Pradesh: An Experimental Auction to Inform Segmentation & Subsidy Strategies

For most of the rural poor in developing countries, improving day-to-day quality of life requires improvements in agricultural productivity. With the gradual reduction of government support for public agricultural research, extension, and marketing in many of these settings, the dissemination of new agricultural technologies is increasingly shaped by the private sector(Feder, Willett and Zijp 2001). When the private agro-services sector thrives, farmers often benefit from better information, more options and, ultimately, higher productivity. For many agricultural technologies, however, the private sector lacks the incentives and information needed to successfully serve the needs of poor farmers. In these cases, targeted subsidies are often proposed as a way to encourage broader technology dissemination – but the lack of information about poor farmers’ valuation of new agricultural technologies typically remains a constraint. Consequently, even when there is a political will to target poor farmers with subsidy support, a vague and incomplete understanding of how