Management consultants’ perceptions of the effectiveness of management consultancy across different types of organizations.

Last registered on April 23, 2026

Pre-Trial

General Information

Title

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0018369

Initial registration date

April 14, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

April 23, 2026, 9:23 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Primary Investigator

Name

Alessandra Fenizia

Affiliation

George Washington University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Renata Lemos Lemos

PI Affiliation

World Bank

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2026-04-14

End date

2026-12-31

Keywords

Behavior, Education, Firms & Productivity

Additional Keywords

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.

Abstract

This study aims to explore management consultants’ perceptions of the effectiveness of management consultancy across different types of organizations. While there is a substantial body of research on the impact of consultancy interventions—particularly in the private
sector—there is limited evidence on what consultants themselves view as important and impactful. To address this gap, we plan to conduct a survey of management consultants in Greece. Specifically, we seek to understand which organizational settings consultants consider most conducive to improvements in organizational outcomes, and whether there are perceived barriers to implementing such interventions in public sector institutions.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Fenizia, Alessandra and Renata Lemos Lemos. 2026. "Management consultants’ perceptions of the effectiveness of management consultancy across different types of organizations.." AEA RCT Registry. April 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18369-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

This experiment survey consists of three components administered through an online survey to management consultants.

Discrete Choice Experiment: Participants are presented with 8 pairs of hypothetical organizations and asked to select which would experience greater performance improvement if both were to implement the recommendations of management consultants. Organizations are described across seven management practice attributes: frequency of performance tracking (annually vs. monthly), target horizon (short-term vs. short- and long-term), approach to problem handling (fix only vs. fix and prevent recurrence), manager performance bonuses (none vs. some), promotion method (merit-based vs. tenure/connections), speed of reassignment of poor performers (within 3–6 months vs. after 2 years), and manager training budget per employee (ranging from 30% below to 30% above average). Sector labels are omitted to avoid priming effects. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four blocks of choice sets.

Ranking of Barriers: Participants are asked to rank perceived barriers to the use of management consultancy in public sector organizations.

Belief-Updating Experiment: All participants are first presented with a case study of a management consultancy intervention in Greek Vocational Training Institutions (VTIs) and asked to estimate its take-up rate and intention-to-treat (ITT) effects on dropout rates and apprenticeship assignments, eliciting their prior beliefs. Participants are then randomly assigned (50/50) to treatment or control. The treatment group is shown the actual results from the VTI intervention (Fenizia et al., 2026), while the control group is not. All participants then predict the effectiveness of a similar intervention in Greek hospital emergency rooms — specifically its take-up rate and effects on patient wait times — as well as their general beliefs about consultancy effectiveness in the public and private sectors more broadly.

Intervention Start Date

2026-04-15

Intervention End Date

2026-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

1. The organizational characteristics that management consultants associate with greater improvement potential from management consultancy, as elicited through the discrete choice experiment.
2. The prior beliefs about the take-up and effectiveness of management consultancy interventions in public vocational training institutes, as elicited before treatment assignment. These are descriptive outcomes characterizing the baseline distribution of consultant beliefs about public sector consultancy effectiveness, including the mean, dispersion, and shape of beliefs across the sample, independently of any treatment effect analysis.
3. The posterior beliefs about the take-up and effectiveness of management consultancy interventions in public sector organizations, specifically in the context of emergency rooms.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

1. The perceived barriers to management consultants in the public sector
2. The perceived public-private effectiveness gap, defined as the difference between the respondent's general belief about public sector consultancy effectiveness and their general belief about private sector consultancy effectiveness (as elicited by the paired post-exercise question). The public sector response and private sector response will also be reported separately.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Discrete Choice Experiment: Participants are randomly assigned to one of four blocks of choice sets (drawn from a D-efficient design of 32 choice sets). Participants are shown 8 pairs of hypothetical organizations with 7 attributes.

Belief-Updating Experiment: All participants are shown a case study of a management consultancy intervention in Greek Vocational Training Institutions (VTIs) and asked to estimate its effects (eliciting prior beliefs). Participants are then randomly assigned with equal probability to treatment or control. Randomization for the belief-updating experiment is conducted via Qualtrics with a 50/50 split. The treatment group is shown the actual results of the VTI intervention; the control group is not. All participants then predict the effectiveness of a similar intervention in Greek hospital emergency rooms (eliciting posterior beliefs).

Experimental Design Details

Not available

Randomization Method

Randomization for the belief-updating experiment is conducted via Qualtrics with a 50/50 split.

Randomization Unit

Individual participant

Was the treatment clustered?