Aparajita Agarwal

Valentina Assenova and Aparajita Agarwal, “Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Africa”. In De Gruyter Handbook of Sociology of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, edited by Olav Sorenson and Patricia H. Thornton, (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025), pp. 289-312

Abstract: Entrepreneurship and innovation in Africa-pivotal for the continent’s economic progress-present a contrast to Europe and North America with unique challenges and opportunities facing African startups and micro, small, and medium enterprises. This chapter offers a comprehensive examination of these differences and distinctive features of African startup and innovation ecosystems, highlighting insights from extant research and opportunities for empirical exploration and theoretical elaboration. It explores the relevance of these African experiences to similar emerging and developing economies and emphasizes the need for research that specifically addresses these unique dynamics, particularly in areas where existing theories and insights may not fully apply.

Aparajita Agarwal (Working), Digital yet Human? Platform Value Capture and Agent Trade-offs at the Last Mile.

Abstract: This study examines how local agents—intermediaries that connect organizations, such as digital platforms, to customers in developing contexts—respond in heterogeneous ways to a platform's shift from value creation to value capture based on their economic and relational trade-offs. The study utilizes a proprietary dataset of over 450,000 transactions between agents and customers from a digital platform that provided essential financial services to customers in rural India, and is supplemented by qualitative interviews. The findings reveal that agents’ responses are shaped by their social ties and community relationships, such that post an exogenous change in platform’s fee, agents transact even less with customers with whom they have strong repeated exchange relations and those from their same social group, while their negative response are attenuated in socially diverse communities. The findings reveal heterogeneity in agent responses influenced by social relations, and have implications for the customer segments reached and the platform’s value capture strategy. As the global economy becomes increasingly digital, organizations cannot ignore the role of social ties and community embeddedness. This study contributes to the literature on intermediation in emerging markets, emphasizing the strategic importance of understanding agent trade-offs and the social fabric in formulating platform strategies.

Aparajita Agarwal and Tyler Wry (Working), Inert or Adaptive: How Microenterprises Navigate External Disruptions.

Abstract: Microenterprises are crucial to the global economy, yet our understanding of strategic decision making in these firms remains less developed. This research takes an abductive approach to examine how microentrepreneurs respond to external disruptions, the performance implications of these strategies and factors predicting different response choices. Using multi-country data from the World Bank COV-ES surveys and two waves of proprietary field surveys with microentrepreneurs in India, we study these questions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find substantial heterogeneity in the responses of these businesses. Strategic adaptation emerges as a common and effective approach, challenging prevailing narratives that consider microenterprises homogenous and strategically inert. Machine learning analysis shows that prior entrepreneurship experience, financial resources, search breadth, and technology use predict adaptation.

Aparajita Agarwal and Valentina Assenova (2024), Mobile Money as a Stepping Stone to Financial Inclusion: How Digital Multisided Platforms Fill Institutional Voids, Organization Science, 35 (3), pp. 769-787. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16562

Abstract: The literature on institutional voids examines how intermediaries, such as business groups and business incubators, address such voids in emerging economies. However, it remains unclear whether and how digital multisided platforms fill these voids given their unique features. This study focuses on mobile money platforms, which allow users without bank accounts or credit cards to perform financial transactions. We propose that these platforms !ll institutional voids in three ways by (i) enabling data-based certification, (ii) providing unified access to distributed services, and (iii) scaling through network effects to reach previously excluded market participants. We argue that these novel mechanisms enable mobile money platforms to expand credit access to end users from formal financial institutions and thereby act as stepping stones to financial inclusion. Our analysis is based on a difference-in-difference design that leverages regulatory changes that allowed nonbanks to operate as mobile money operators and data from a representative random sample of 151,771 individuals in 78 countries. We supplement our quantitative analysis with rich, hand-collected qualitative evidence to illustrate the mechanisms underlying our findings.