This study examines how local agents – intermediaries that connect firms such as digital platforms to last mile customers – respond to increased value capture by the firm and the heterogeneity in their responses to different customer segments. Utilizing a proprietary dataset of over 400,000 transactions on a digital platform in rural India I examine how agents, pivotal in bridging infrastructure and capability gaps, react to incentive changes.…Read More
In contexts with high poverty, impact-driven for-profit firms often take market-based approaches to drive inclusive growth while being financially sustainable. Even with the alignment between “doing well” and “doing good” that these firms supposedly seek to achieve, successful business strategies in these contexts have been associated with breadth of reach (reaching maximum number of beneficiaries) with little or no attention to depth of reach (repeated engagement with each beneficiary). However a focus on breadth alone may lead to tunnel vision when it comes to social impact. This paper draws the distinction between the two approaches and examines their implications for the outcomes for the different actors involved in BoP markets– the organization, its agents and the end beneficiaries. …Read More
We examine the assumptions that underlie our understanding of profit maximizing firms and test whether product/service scope has different implications for social impact creation. This has both theoretical and practical implications for business model innovation that aims to deliver both financial and social value.…Read More
Micro-ventures in emerging economies are often highly vulnerable to shocks. They neither have the slack resources nor a supporting organization structure to buffer them from disruptions. Academic enquiry into the response and resilience of such enterprises in emerging economies is fairly limited. In this paper, we examine how new digital technologies affect the learning and adaptation process of these ventures.…Read More
