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      Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment
      20 Jun 2018Working Paper Summaries

      Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment

      by Jason Acimovic, Chris Parker, David F. Drake, and Karthik Balasubramanian
      Mobile money is popular in developing economies but many agents do not maintain proper inventory levels. This paper, based on a study of 4,771 agents in Tanzania, shows how training and ongoing guidance improve their inventory management. Agents who get in-person training and explicit inventory recommendations tend to stock out less.
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      Author Abstract

      When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the workers’ domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these workers are 1) what guidance to deliver and 2) what kind of training (if any) to provide. We examine these choices in the context of mobile money platforms—systems that allow users in developing economies to deposit, transfer, and withdraw money using their mobile phones. Mobile money has grown quickly, but high stockout rates of currency persist due to suboptimal inventory decisions made by contracted employees (called agents). In partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, we perform a randomized controlled trial with 4,771 agents over eight weeks to examine how differing types of guidance and training impact the agents' inventory management. We find agents who are trained in person and receive an explicit, personalized, daily text message recommendation of how much electronic currency to stock are less likely to stock out. These agents are more likely to alter their electronic currency balance on a day (rebalance). In contrast, agents trained in person but who receive summary statistics of transaction volumes or agents who are notified about the program and not offered in-person training do not experience changes in stockouts or rebalances. We observe no evidence of learning or fatigue. Agent-level heterogeneity in the treatment effects shows that the agents who handle substantially more customer deposits than withdrawals benefit most from the intervention.

      Paper Information

      • Full Working Paper Text
      • Working Paper Publication Date: May 2018
      • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #18-106
      • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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