Achievement

Trainee Walker Hanlon (Economics) and Associate Guy Grossman (Political Science) collaborated on a large-scale research project examining the effectiveness of community empowerment groups such as farmer's associations and women's cooperatives, in the allocation of public goods. Their hypothesis is that the key factor determining an individual's candidacy decision may be the source of opportunity costs, rather than size. To test their hypothesis, Grossman and Hanlon designed and conducted a multi-level and multi-method field experiment with 1,554 farmers from fifty farmers' associations throughout Uganda. Based upon their initial findings, they developed a formal model to examine the variations in manager effort and consider how members use information about candidates' opportunity costs and stake in the organization to analyze the expected levels of effort by prospective candidates.