TY  - JOUR
AU  - Banerjee, Abhijit
AU  - Barnhardt, Sharon
AU  - Duflo, Esther
TI  - Movies, Margins and Marketing: Encouraging the Adoption of Iron-Fortified Salt
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21616
PY  - 2015
Y2  - October 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21616
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21616
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21616.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Abhijit Banerjee
Department of Economics, E52-540
MIT
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617/253-8855
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu

Sharon Barnhardt
Vastrapur
Ahmedabad 380015
INDIA
India
E-Mail: barnhardt@iimahd.ernet.in

Esther Duflo
Department of Economics, E52-544
MIT
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617/258-7013
E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu
M1  - published as Abhijit Banerjee, Sharon Barnhardt, Esther Duflo. "Movies, Margins, and Marketing: Encouraging the Adoption of Iron-Fortified Salt," in David A. Wise, editor, "Insights in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (2017)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2015-11-23
M3  - presented at "Conference on the Economics of Aging", April 30 - May 2, 2015
AB  - A set of randomized experiments shed light on how markets and information influence household decisions to adopt nutritional innovations. Of 400 Indian villages, we randomly assigned half to an intervention where all shopkeepers were offered the option to sell a new salt, fortified with both iron and iodine (and not just iodine) at 50% discount. Within treatment villages, we conducted additional interventions: an increase in retailer margin (for one or several shopkeepers), the screening of an “edutainment” movie on the benefits of double-fortified salt, a flyer informing households of the product’s availability, and free distribution to a subset of households. We find that two interventions – showing the short film and offering an incentive to all shopkeepers – significantly increased usage: both by 5.5 percentage points, or over 50%, over take up without intervention, three years after launch. For comparison, only about half of households given the salt for free actually consumed it.
ER  -