Webinar: Curating Local Knowledge: Experimental Evidence from Small Retailers in Indonesia

Send an email to seminar@tinbergen.nl before June 8 if you would like to attend.

Business practices and performance vary widely across businesses within the same sub-economy. We use this heterogeneity to assess and curate best practices among small urban retailers in Indonesia, and share this local knowledge with contemporary business owners in our sample. Through quantitative and qualitative fieldwork, we develop a handbook that associates best business practices with performance and provides idiosyncratic implementation guidance informed by exemplary local retailers. This handbook is then distributed to a randomly selected sample of shop owners and is complemented with three experiential learning modules. One group is invited to the screening of a professionally produced video featuring the paths to success of star local business owners; another is offered two 30 minute individual assistance sessions
on implementing the handbook; and a third group is offered both. Eighteen months after the intervention, we find significant impacts on practice adoption when the handbook is coupledwith experiential learning, and up to a 35% increase in profits and 16.7% increase in revenues. The types of practices adopted map these performance improvements to efficiency gains rather than other channels. A simple cost-benefit analysis shows such locally relevant knowledge canbe codified and scaled successfully at relatively low cost. Joint with Julius Rüschenpöhler, Burak Uras, Bilal Zia.

Read paper here.