Can information alone change behavior? Response to arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh
By M. Madajewicz, A. Pfaff, A. Geen, J. Graziano, I. Hussein, Hasina Momotaj, Roksana Sylvi, H. Ahsan. 2007
331 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract We study how effectively information induces Bangladeshi households to avoid a health risk. The response to information is large and rapid; knowing that the household's well water has an unsafe concentration of arsenic raises the probability that the household changes to another well within one year by 0.37. Households who change wells increase the time spent obtaining water fifteen-fold. We identify a causal effect of information, since incidence of arsenic is uncorrelated with household characteristics. Our door-to-door information campaign provides well-specific arsenic levels without which behavior does not change. Media communicate general information about arsenic less expensively and no less effectively.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f7ac03f28c77639bf6a70d3dab54e9269e7d055
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “Madajewicz et al. (2007) show that information about well safety regarding arsenic levels results in large switches from unsafe to safe water sources.”
- Willingness to Pay for Clean Air: Evidence from Air Purifier Markets in China (2020, neutral): “For evidenceinother developing countries, see Madajewicz et al. (2007) and Jalan and Somanathan (2008).”
- Providing Safe Water: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations (2010, background): “Further evidence consistent with the idea that psychological factors may be important is provided by Madajewicz et al. (2007) and Tarozzi et al. (2009), who study how people respond to information about water quality in an area of Bangladesh, where wells are frequently contaminated with arsenic.”