Predicting entrepreneurial success is hard: Evidence from a business plan competition in Nigeria

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: McKenzie, David; Sansone, Dario
• 署名单位: The World Bank; Georgetown University; University of Exeter
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019.07.002
• 发表日期: 2019
• 关键词: Entrepreneurship; Machine Learning; Business plans; nigeria

摘要

We compare the absolute and relative performance of three approaches to predicting outcomes for entrants in a business plan competition in Nigeria: Business plan scores from judges, simple ad-hoc prediction models used by researchers, and machine learning approaches. We find that i) business plan scores from judges are uncorrelated with business survival, employment, sales, or profits three years later; ii) a few key characteristics of entrepreneurs such as gender, age, ability, and business sector do have some predictive power for future outcomes; iii) modern machine learning methods do not offer noticeable improvements; iv) the overall predictive power of all approaches is very low, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of picking competition winners.