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Dr. Tara Mitchell

Assistant Professor (Economics)
      
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Dr. Tara Mitchell

Assistant Professor (Economics)

 mitchet@tcd.ie

 


Project Title
 Middlemen, Bargaining and Price Information: Is Knowledge Power?
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Summary
This paper investigates an important channel through which improved access to market information could increase the prices that producers receive from middlemen. I develop a theoretical model of trade between a farmer and a middleman which allows for the existence of different types of middlemen. The source of heterogeneity is attitudes towards fairness. I provide an empirical test of the theory from an original framed field experiment carried out with farmers and middlemen in India. The model predicts that there will be a non-monotonic relationship between the benefit of information and the cost of switching to a new middleman. The results of the experiment support the predictions of the model and demonstrate that actual middlemen differ in their attitudes towards fairness, middlemen make higher offers when the farmer is informed, and the benefit of information to the farmer varies with the cost of switching.
Funding Agency
STICERD, LSE
Project Title
 Quality Observability and Vertical Integration in Supply Chains
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Summary
This paper presents a model of a supply chain for a good involving two stages of production. Effort must be exerted at both stages if a high-quality good is to be produced. Effort is not observable and the quality of the good is not perfectly observable. The model predicts that there will be a range of values of the price difference between high-quality and low-quality goods for which production of high-quality goods will occur with vertical integration but will not occur if the tasks are carried out by separate agents. The range of price values for which this occurs will be decreasing as the level of observability of quality increases and will disappear as quality becomes perfectly observable. The paper also presents some case studies of supply chains for various products in a number of developing countries that have characteristics which are consistent with the predictions of the model.
Project Title
 A Cross-Country Analysis of the Diffusion of Information and Communications Technology
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Summary
In this paper, I use a logistic model of technology diffusion to investigate the relationship between rates of mobile phone and Internet use and a number of geographic, institutional and economic variables, in a sample of 164 countries from 1990 to 2009. The aim of this paper is to identify the main characteristics of countries that have had success in adopting these new technologies in order to give us some insight into the barriers which may be faced by those countries which have been less successful.

Details Date
Founding member of the Trinity Impact Evaluation Research Centre 2015 - 2020
Details Date From Date To
Member of the Central Statistics Office and Irish Economic Association Data Access Working Group July 2024 Present
Carol Newman, Tara Mitchell, Marcus Holmlund and Chloe Fernandez, Group incentives for the public good: A field experiment on improving the urban environment, The World Bank Economic Review, 2024, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Tara Mitchell, Paying for Unobservable Quality: Moral Hazard and the Challenges of Maintaining Quality along the Supply Chain, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 47, (2), 2022, p410 - 426, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Regulatory Policy in, editor(s)John O'Hagan, Francis O'Toole and Ciara Whelan , The Economy of Ireland: Policy Making in a Global Context, London, UK, 2021, pp109 - 135, [Tara Mitchell and Francis O'Toole], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Chloe Fernandez, Marcus Holmlund, Tara Mitchell, Carol Newman, Stormwater Management and Climate Change Adaptation Project (PROGEP), Impact Evaluation, Baseline Data, The World Bank, 2019, Notes: [This dataset is based upon data collection that took place in 2014. The complete dataset was created and submitted to the World Bank data catalogue in 2016, it was made publicly available in 2019], Dataset, PUBLISHED  URL
Carol Newman, Tara Mitchell, Marcus Holmlund and Chloe Fernandez, Group Incentives for the Public Good: A Field Experiment on Improving the Urban Environment, 2019, Working Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Chloe Fernandez. Marcus Holmlund, Tara Mitchell, Carol Newman, Operation Clean Neighborhood: working with communities for flood risk mitigation in Senegal, 2018, Report, PUBLISHED
Regulation, 'Nudging' and Competition in, editor(s)John O'Hagan and Francis O'Toole , The Economy of Ireland, Palgrave, 2017, pp116 - 142, [Tara Mitchell and Francis O'Toole], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Tara Mitchell, Is Knowledge Power? Information and Switching Costs in Agricultural Markets, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 99, (5), 2017, p1307 - 1326, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
  

Michael King and Tara Mitchell, 'Evaluation of Savings Group e-Recording Technology Endline Data Collection', 2016, -, Fieldwork collection, COMPLETED
Chloe Fernandez. Marcus Holmlund, Tara Mitchell, Carol Newman, 'Stormwater Management and Climate Change Adaptation Project (PROGEP), Impact Evaluation, Endline Data Collection', 2016, -, Fieldwork collection, COMPLETED
Tara Mitchell, Factors Influencing the Diffusion of Information and Communications Technology: Are Developing Countries Different?, 2016, Working Paper, PUBLISHED
Tara Mitchell, Quality Observability and the Structure of Agricultural Supply Chains, 2016, Working Paper, PUBLISHED

  


Award Date
Provost's Teaching Award 2019
Dennis Conniffe Prize for best paper by a young researcher presented at the Irish Economics Association annual meeting 2013
Economics Network Learning and Teaching Award UK, commendation 2011
Economics Departmental Teaching Prize, LSE 2011
ESRC Studentship 2006
Terence Gorman Award, TCD 2005
Development Economics, Agricultural Economics, Economics of Information