ABOUT BOOK

West Bengal potato farmers cannot directly access wholesale markets and do not knowwholesale prices. Local middlemen earn large margins; pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices is negligible. When we informed farmers in randomly chosen villages about wholesale prices, average farmgate sales and prices were unaffected, but pass-through to farmgate prices increased. These results can be explained by a model where farmers bargain ex post with village middlemen, with the outside option of selling to middlemen outside the village. They are inconsistent with standard oligopolistic models of pass-through, search frictions, or risk-sharing contracts.We acknowledge grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and USAID's Development Innovation Ventures program. We are grateful to three anonymous referees, Abhijit Banerjee, Francesco Decarolis, Jordi Jamandreu, Dan Keniston, Asim Khwaja, Kaivan Munshi, Rohini Pande, Marc Rysman, Chris Udry, and participants at several seminars and conferences. We received excellent research assistance from Khushabu Kasabwala, Prathap Kasina, Arpita Khanna, Clarence Lee, Owen McCarthy, Sanyam Parikh, Moumita Poddar, Sunil Shoo, and Ricci Yeung. All errors are our own. (Hong Kong Research Grants Council; International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC; International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics; USAID's Development Innovation Ventures program)Accepted manuscrip