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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

Governments frequently rely on multiple actors to deliver technology-adoption policies at scale, often presuming that layering low-cost interventions, such as information, onto existing programs is at least weakly beneficial. We show that this need not hold. Using a cluster-randomized trial of private-sector sanitation microloans and an NGO-led information campaign in rural India, combined with quasi-random variation in government policy implementation, we find that information can reduce adoption when delivery is fragmented across actors. The mechanism operates through household expectations about complementarities that fail to materialize. Our findings offer a new explanation for why interventions may lose effectiveness at scale.