Improving farmers' and consumers' welfare in agricultural supply chains via data-driven analytics and modeling : from theory to practice

The upstream parts of the agricultural supply chain consists of millions of smallholder farmers who continue to suffer from extreme poverty. The first stream of research in this thesis focuses on online agri-platforms which have been launched to connect geographically isolated markets in many developing countries. This work is in close collaboration with the state government of Karnataka in India which launched the Unified Market Platform (UMP). Leveraging both public data and platform data, a difference-in-differences analysis in Chapter 2 suggests that the implementation of the UMP has significantly increased modal price of certain commodities (5.1%-3.5%), while prices for other commodities have not changed. The analysis provides evidence that logistical challenges, bidding efficiency, market concentration, and price discovery process are important factors explaining the variable impact of UMP on prices.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Singhvi, Somya.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Retsef Levi and Yanchong Zheng.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129083

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129083