Journal article
Peer effects and risk-taking among entrepreneurs: Lab-in-the-field evidence
MA Lopera, S Marchand
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization | ELSEVIER | Published : 2018
Abstract
We study how social interactions influence entrepreneurs’ risk-taking decisions. We conduct two risk-taking experiments with young Ugandan entrepreneurs. Between the two experiments, the entrepreneurs participate in a networking activity where they build relationships and discuss with each other. We collect data on peer network formation and on participants’ choices before and after the networking activity. We find that participants tend to make more (less) risky choices in the second experiment if the peers they discuss with make on average more (less) risky choices in the first experiment. This suggests that even short term social interactions may affect risk-taking decisions. We also find..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Charles Bellemare, Luc Bissonnette, Vincent Boucher, Bernard Fortin, and two anonymous referees for useful comments that greatly improved the quality of this paper. This study was carried out with financial and scientific support from the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) (www.pep-net.org) and funding from the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom (or UK Aid) and the government of Canada through the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). We are especially grateful to the team of PEP-researchers (PIERI-12451) lead by Juliet Ssekandi, who allowed us to join her evaluation project to collect experimental data. We also thank Benjamin Kachero and Samuel Galiwango for their extraordinary assistance in the field. We are grateful for the support provided by the PEP Research Director of Experimental Impact Evaluations Maria Laura Alzua, and by the PEP Scientific Advisor John Cockburn. This research benefited from collaborations with the Department for Children and Youth at the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development (MGLSD), UNICEF-Uganda and Enterprise Uganda. We thank the Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Societe et culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for our scholarships.