Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service

Full citation:

Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath, Jessica Zhu. 2024. “Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service”. Working Paper. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4536641  

Links:

https://precisiondev.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Athey-et-al-Sept-2024.pdf

Abstract:

Information and Communication Technology is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting timing of automated voice calls increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We design, estimate, and evaluate a novel recommendation system that customizes contact times to individual characteristics. This generates significant gains, up to an 8% increase over the baseline pickup rate of 0.31. However, our on-policy estimated gains are lower than predicted by off-policy analysis. We show accounting for evolution of user preferences over time in off-policy estimation improves performance. We also demonstrate how this approach can be used to target vulnerable populations, and introduce a technique to quantify equity-efficiency trade-offs, and measure the social cost of resource constraints.