Information problems are pervasive in developing economies and can hinder productivity growth. This paper studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own cultivation experience, i.e. learning by doing, to redress important information gaps about imperfectly known input technologies. First, I build a theoretical model which links learning by doing in one period to improved input choices in the next period, and show that this can be impeded by uncertainty about what is being observed due to noisy cultivation signals and by uncertainty about what to infer about market varieties due to imperfect variety integrity. Second, I apply this framework to cotton farmers in Pakistan, where farmers have imperfect information prior to cultivation about the extent to which their seeds have pest resistant biotechnology. The results suggest that farmers are unable to learn by doing about this aspect of their seeds due to a high degree of noise in cultivation signals. The paper highlights the potential difficulties in parsing out and processing information from cultivation experience alone and therefore of learning by doing by rural producers in a development context.

Why have Israel and the Palestinians failed to implement a ‘land for peace’ solution, along the lines of the Oslo Accords? This paper studies the application of strategic behavior models, in the form of games, to this question. I show that existing models of the conflict largely rely on unrealistic assumptions about what the main actors are trying to achieve. Specifically, they assume that Israel is strategically interested in withdrawing from the occupied territories pending resolvable security concerns but that it is obstructed from doing so by violent Palestinians with other objectives. I use historical analysis along with bargaining theory to shed doubt on this assumption, and to argue that the persistence of conflict has been aligned with, not contrary to, the interests of the militarily powerful party, Israel. The analysis helps explain, from a strategic behavior perspective, why resolutions like the Oslo Accords, which rely on the land for peace paradigm and on self-enforcement, have failed to create peace.