CURATING LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM SMALL RETAILERS IN INDONESIA

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dalton, Patricio S.; Rueschenpoehler, Julius; Uras, Burak; Zia, Bilal
• 署名单位: Tilburg University; Tilburg University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; The World Bank
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvab007
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 2622-2657
• 关键词: Entrepreneurship; education; television; mechanism; inference; HEALTH; IMPACT; FIRMS

摘要

Business practices and performance vary widely across businesses within the same sector. A key outstanding question is why profitable practices do not readily diffuse. We conduct a field experiment among urban retailers in Indonesia to study whether alleviating informational and behavioral frictions can facilitate such diffusion in a cost-effective manner. Through quantitative and qualitative fieldwork, we curate a handbook that associates locally relevant practices with performance, and provides idiosyncratic implementation guidance informed by exemplary local retailers. We complement this handbook with two light-touch interventions to facilitate behavior change. A subset of retailers is invited to a documentary movie screening featuring the paths to success of exemplary peers. Another subset is offered two 30-minute personal visits by a local facilitator. A third group is offered both. Eighteen months later, we find significant impacts on practice adoption when the handbook is coupled with the two behavioral nudges, and up to a 35% increase in profits and 16.7% increase in sales. These findings suggest both informational and behavioral constraints are at play. The types of practices adopted map the performance improvements to efficiency gains rather than other channels. A simple cost-benefit analysis shows such locally relevant knowledge can be codified and scaled successfully at relatively low cost.