Anirudh Sankar

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Improving Technology Adoption through Participatory Scientific Empowerment: Evidence from Uganda

A volume of evidence points to the importance of supporting learning and deliberating in wide-ranging situations. This is particularly relevant for technology adoption in developing contexts, where candidate technologies may have been developed from afar. This research will explore how taxi drivers and farmers in Uganda learn about and adopt a novel irrigation technology. The technology involves their joint participation and offers both parties benefits, but little is known about what constitutes the technology's optimal deployment. The randomized intervention will encourage adoptees' use of scientific experimentation to promote their own discovery of optimal adoption.    

Anirudh Sankar, Department of Economics

Anirudh Sankar is a second-year PhD student in economics at Stanford. His areas of research include development economics and behavioral economics, and he is particularly interested in networks, trust in experts, and the division of cognitive labor. Prior to his PhD studies, Sankar was a research assistant at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), where he helped shaped the statistical analysis of a large scale cross randomized experiment on immunization. Prior to that, Sankar was a data scientist in the Bay Area. Sankar holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a MMath from the University of Waterloo.

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