Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary Expansion of e-commerce presents new opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to enter broader market at lower costs, but the SMEs face barriers to growth after entry. To facilitate new entrants to overcome these barriers, this paper explores implementing a training program as a randomized controlled experiment with over two million new sellers on a large e-commerce platform. A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>Expansion of e-commerce presents new opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to enter broader market at lower costs, but the SMEs face barriers to growth after entry. To facilitate new entrants to overcome these barriers, we implement a training program as a randomized controlled experiment with over two million new sellers on a large e-commerce platform. The training focuses on practical skills specific to online business operations. Treated new sellers with access to the training earn higher revenues. These sellers improve marketing skills and attract more consumers to their online stores. Leveraging detailed consumer-seller matched search and browsing data, we find that consumers have higher purchase probability when they encounter new sellers. When consumers make purchases, they choose treated new sellers over incumbents; moreover doing so does not lower the quality of their purchases. We use a structural model to characterize consumer demand and recover sellers' underlying quality. Both treated and control new sellers have higher quality compared to incumbents. The training increases new sellers' likelihood of being encountered by consumers, which improves the matching quality between consumers and sellers. The counterfactual exercise shows that training leads to higher consumer surplus and sellers' total revenues due to market expansion. The platform could benefit in both short and long run because of the training.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links https://scholar.harvard.edu/zsun/publications/lifting-growth-barriers-benefit-all-evidence-entrepreneur-training-experiment-two Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables Results Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Citation for use in academic references
