Diwan Faizan, Makana Grace, McKenzie David, Paruzzolo Silvia
Innovations for Poverty Action, Kisumu and Kakamega, Kenya.
Development Research Group, World Bank, Washington, DC, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2014 Oct 9;9(10):e109873. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0109873. eCollection 2014.
Business training programs are a common form of support to small businesses, but organizations providing this training often struggle to get business owners to attend. We evaluate the role of invitation choice structure in determining agreement to participate and actual attendance. A field experiment randomly assigned female small business owners in Kenya (N = 1172) to one of three invitation types: a standard opt-in invitation; an active choice invitation where business owners had to explicitly say yes or no to the invitation; and an enhanced active choice invitation which highlighted the costs of saying no. We find no statistically significant effect of these alternative choice structures on willingness to participate in training, attending at least one day, and completing the course. The 95 percent confidence interval for the active treatment effect on attendance is [-1.9%, +9.5%], while for the enhanced active choice treatment it is [-4.1%, +7.7%]. The effect sizes consistent with our data are smaller than impacts measured in health and retirement savings studies in the United States. We examine several potential explanations for the lack of effect in a developing country setting. We find evidence consistent with two potential reasons being limited decision-making power amongst some women, and lower levels of cognition making the enhanced active choice wording less effective.
商业培训项目是对小企业的一种常见支持形式，但提供此类培训的组织往往难以让企业主参加。我们评估了邀请选择结构在决定参与意愿和实际出席情况方面的作用。一项实地实验将肯尼亚的女性小企业主（N = 1172）随机分为三种邀请类型之一：标准的选择加入邀请；主动选择邀请，即企业主必须明确对邀请表示同意或拒绝；以及强化主动选择邀请，强调拒绝邀请的代价。我们发现，这些不同的选择结构对参与培训的意愿、至少参加一天培训以及完成课程没有统计学上的显著影响。主动处理对出席率的95%置信区间为[-1.9%，+9.5%]，而强化主动选择处理的置信区间为[-4.1%，+7.7%]。与我们的数据一致的效应大小小于在美国健康和退休储蓄研究中测得的影响。我们研究了在发展中国家背景下缺乏效果的几个潜在原因。我们发现有证据表明，两个潜在原因可能是一些女性的决策权有限，以及认知水平较低使得强化主动选择的措辞效果不佳。
