Experimental Design
We will include ten public markets where mobile money agents tend to be clustered, five of which will be in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (the capital and largest city) and five of which will be in Mwanza, Tanzania (the second-largest city). Individual markets will be selected by field team managers.
Within each market, we will conduct a census of agents and include the 20 agents closest to the central point assigned to each market in our study. Of these 20 agents, we will select 10 to be included as recruitment points for consumers who will serve as study participants, through a simple random selection. All mystery shopping visits included in this study will be with this subset of 10 agents per market (100 agents total). We will recruit four consumers from each agent through intercept surveys. Consumers will need to meet the following requirements to be eligible to be included in the study:
1. We will recruit two female and two male consumers from each agent location.
2. Consumers must own a smartphone and pass a basic digital literacy test (to ensure they are able to complete our self-administered, WhatsApp-based surveys independently)
3. Consumers must regularly use the agent they were recruited at.
4. Consumers must have a mobile money account with the provider that the agent they were recruited at was assigned to for mystery shopping visits. (Mobile money agents may serve multiple mobile money providers. As part of the descriptive study being conducted alongside this RCT, agents that serve multiple providers are randomly assigned to one of the providers they serve for all mystery shopping visits, including mystery shopping visits conducted by local consumers).
Consumers will be assigned to one of four treatment arms. Assignment will be at the individual consumer level, stratified by the agent at which consumers were recruited (so each of the four consumers recruited at a given agent will be assigned to a different treatment arm). Treatment assignments will be carried out such that consumers assigned to Treatment Arm 1 and Treatment Arm 2 are different genders and similarly consumers assigned to Treatment Arm 3 and Treatment Arm 4 are different genders.
Treatment Arms 3 and 4 refer to "high quality" and "low quality" agents, respectively. These designations are defined as follows. Based on data from mystery shopping visits conducted by enumerators prior to the baseline of this study, agents will be assigned a score based on their likelihood of successfully completing transactions and fees they charge for completing transactions (conditional on successfully completing the transaction). Higher success rate and lower fees will yield higher scores, and success rate and fees will be given equal weight in generating these scores. Of the ten agents included in this study per market, the five with the lowest scores will be considered "low quality" agents and the remaining five will be considered "high quality" agents.
The treatment arms are as follows:
- Treatment Arm 1 ("Control"): These consumers will not be assigned to any mystery shopping visits
- Treatment Arm 2 ("Regular agents only"): These consumers will be assigned to mystery shopping visits with agents that they use regularly (at least twice in the past 90 days). All consumers assigned to this treatment arm will conduct four visits with the agent they were recruited at. If consumers regularly use more than one agent in the market, they will be randomly assigned to another agent that they use regularly, and will conduct an additional 4 visits with this agent. Consumers will conduct all four of the transaction types discussed in the "Intervention" section with each agent.
- Treatment Arm 3 ("Regular and 'high quality' agents"): These consumers will be assigned to eight mystery shopping visits. Four of these visits will be with the agent they were recruited from. The remaining four visits will be with four different agents, all of which the respondents has not used regularly. Additionally these remaining four visits will be with agents designed as "high quality" based on the above discussion. Finally, these visits will only be with agents that have been assigned to a provider that that consumer has an account with. The four visits with regular agents will include all four types of transactions. The four visits with non-regular agents will also include all four types of transactions, with transaction types being randomly assigned to each agent.
- Treatment Arm 4 ("Regular and 'low quality' agents"): These consumers will be assigned to eight mystery shopping visits. Four of these visits will be with the agent they were recruited from. The remaining four visits will be with four different agents, all of which the respondents has not used regularly. Additionally these remaining four visits will be with agents designed as "low quality" based on the above discussion. Finally, these visits will only be with agents that have been assigned to a provider that that consumer has an account with. The four visits with regular agents will include all four types of transactions. The four visits with non-regular agents will also include all four types of transactions, with transaction types being randomly assigned to each agent.
We have four primary research questions:
Research question 1: Why (or why not) do customers actively shop around for the agent who offers the lowest price or the most reliable service? Are they aware of the distribution of pricing and reliability of agents in the market the frequent? Do they prioritize price, reliability, or other factors (such as proximity or social relationships) when deciding which agents to use?
Research question 1 is descriptive and will be addressed through analysis of data collected from consumers at baseline.
Research question 2: Does exposure to additional agent interactions lead to learning by consumers about how to conduct transfers on their own, without agent assistance?
Research question 2 will be addressed by comparing outcomes measured in the follow-up phone surveys regarding types of transactions conducted and the mode used to conduct these transactions between Treatment Arm 1 and the pooled group Treatment Arms 2-4.
Research question 3: Does exposure to new agents that consumers do not regularly use help consumers identify agents who charge lower fees and/or are more reliable? Does this lead consumers to permanently switch which agents they use to conduct transactions? Do they ultimately experience lower costs and higher reliability?
Research question 3 will be addressed by comparing outcomes measured in the follow-up phone surveys regarding the agents consumers use, the fees they incur, and the success rate of those transactions between Treatment Arm 2 and the pooled group Treatment Arms 3-4.
Research question 4: Does exposure to better agents lead consumers to permanently switch agents at higher rates than exposure to worse agents?
Research question 4 will be addressed by comparing outcomes measured in the follow-up phone surveys regarding the agents consumers use between Treatment Arm 3 and Treatment Arm 4.