Abstract
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.
Highlights
Business training is one of the most common forms of active support provided by governments, development agencies, and NGOs throughout the world
We find that active choice and enhanced active choice invitations have no significant impact on getting individuals to agree to attend training, or to attend, compared to a standard opt-in policy
The target population for our study consists of female microenterprise owners in Kenya selected to be invited to participate in the International Labor Organization (ILO) ’s GET (Gender and Entrepreneurship Together) Ahead business training program as part of a randomized controlled trial designed to measure the impact of this program
Summary
Business training is one of the most common forms of active support provided by governments, development agencies, and NGOs throughout the world. Low attendance can occur even when dealing with individuals who had initially expressed interest in attending such a course, with studies in Bosnia-Herzogovina and Peru reporting take-up rates of 39 percent and 51 percent respectively, despite having screened for initial interest in training [2,3] This would not be as much of a concern if those who choose not to attend are doing so because they would not benefit from training, but there are at least two studies which suggest that individuals who are initially the least interested have the most to gain from business training [4,5]. There is a concern that ‘‘because opt-out policies yield decisions through the inaction of the decision maker, they are less likely to engender the kind of committed follow-up that is often useful when it comes to implementing the decision ([8], p.377)
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