Increasing engagement in price crowdsourcing initiatives: Using nudges in Nigeria

African agriculture is yet to reach its full food production potential. One way of addressing this is a better distribution of market signals to farmers and other market participants, which can help them make better-informed decisions, leading to increased income and capacity for investment. Hence, increasing the availability of market information in Africa is a priority and alternative data sources, and new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer huge potential to complement classic official statistics. This has given rise to a number of ICTs and citizen science projects to monitor data in real time, of which food price crowdsourcing in Africa is one. However, one of the main challenges faced by crowdsourcing initiatives is to ensure that individuals feed useful information into the system. In this paper, we test the potential of behavioural interventions to help sustain crowd contributions by leveraging intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivations. We used two randomised control trials (RCTs) to evaluate whether the inclusion of two nudges (one based on social norms and one based on information disclosure) in the design of a food price crowdsourcing initiative can improve crowd engagement. Our results show that social norms increase crowd participation while disclosing price information does not. The latter highlights the need for further research to identify which type of information and format to make it accessible would best help to sustain crowd effort levels. These findings have the potential to be useful in designing future crowdsourcing (or other types of) initiatives that require sustained citizen engagement over time.