Regarding the “Why?,” we speculate about this a little bit in the paper. One explanation is that for all the public good nature of (price) information, a mobile phone — the mechanisms by which information is collected — is a club good. So if a child has a mobile phone, it doesn’t mean the parents necessarily always have access to it.

Still, given how much we caution the reader against over-interpreting our results as anything but an interesting set of correlations, we remain even more cautious about potential stories. We do encourage others, however, to look into the mechanism through which our finding obtains.

Thanks for sharing Duncan!