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Anirudh Sankar

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Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023–2024 Academic Year

The role of mechanistic explanations in technology adoption across contexts: Evidence from Uganda

It is long documented that small-scale farmers in Uganda under-adopt productivity-increasing technologies like inorganic fertilizers. A critical obstacle arises in how farmers learn about technologies. Farmers frequently witness others impressive results with a technology, yet remain unconvinced of its value for themselves. Indeed, simply copying others practices may fail to replicate their success, as African soil and weather conditions vary over small distances, affecting results. This study considers a novel intervention in Eastern Uganda for helping farmers translate from others fertilizer experiences. It discovers whether providing mechanistic explanations of fertilizers helps farmers tailor the practices they observe to their context.


Anirudh Sankar, Department of Economics

headshot of Anirudh Sankar

Anirudh Sankar is a fourth-year PhD student in economics at Stanford. His areas of research include development economics and behavioral economics, and he is particularly interested in uncovering processes of development where all participate in the generation and application of knowledge. Prior to his PhD studies, Sankar was a research assistant at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), where he helped shape 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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