Abstract: 

How can firms in low-income countries be incentivized to upgrade quality? One pathway is providing access to foreign customers with a higher income, a demand for quality and access to information about achieving such quality. However, this route is only available to a small fraction of firms in low-income countries. As income levels and preferences are hard to treat at scale, improving the “savviness” of domestic customers becomes the only policy instrument to change the demand for quality provision. Armstrong and Chen (2009) show theoretically that boosting the share of savvy consumers can increase aggregate quality, producer surplus and overall welfare. We conducted a framed field experiment in Uganda, showing that a simple information-provision intervention can indeed improve the ability of consumers to discern quality.