Mookherjee, DilipMitra, SandipVisaria, SujataTorero, Maximo2019-06-032019-06-032018Dilip Mookherjee, Sandip Mitra, Sujata Visaria, Maximo Torero. 2018. "Middleman Margins and Asymmetric Information: An Experiment with Potato Farmers in West Bengal." Review of Economics and Statistics, Volume 100, Issue 1,0034-6535https://hdl.handle.net/2144/35764West Bengal potato farmers cannot directly access wholesale markets and do not know wholesale prices. Local middlemen earn large margins; pass-through from wholesale to farm-gate prices is negligible. When we informed farmers in randomly chosen villages about wholesale prices, average farm-gate sales and priceswere unaffected, but pass-through to farm-gate prices increased. These results can be explained by a model where farmers bargain ex post with village middlemen, with the outside option of selling to middlemen outside the village. They are inconsistent with standard oligopolistic models of pass-through, search frictions or risk-sharing contracts.en-USApplied economicsEconometricsEconomicsArticle