Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria

We compare the absolute and relative performance of three approaches to predicting outcomes for entrants in a business plan competition in Nigeria: Business plan scores from judges, simple ad hoc prediction models used by researchers, and machine learning approaches. We find that i) business plan sc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	McKenzie, David, Sansone, Dario
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Elsevier 2019
Subjects:	ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PRACTICE MACHINE LEARNING BUSINESS PLAN BUSINESS SURVIVAL COMPETITIVENESS
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32160

id	okr-10986-32160
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-321602021-05-25T10:54:42Z Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria McKenzie, David Sansone, Dario ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PRACTICE MACHINE LEARNING BUSINESS PLAN BUSINESS SURVIVAL COMPETITIVENESS We compare the absolute and relative performance of three approaches to predicting outcomes for entrants in a business plan competition in Nigeria: Business plan scores from judges, simple ad hoc prediction models used by researchers, and machine learning approaches. We find that i) business plan scores from judges are uncorrelated with business survival, employment, sales, or profits three years later; ii) a few key characteristics of entrepreneurs such as gender, age, ability, and business sector do have some predictive power for future outcomes; iii) modern machine learning methods do not offer noticeable improvements; iv) the overall predictive power of all approaches is very low, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of picking competition winners. 2019-08-05T14:40:53Z 2019-08-05T14:40:53Z 2019-11 Journal Article Journal of Development Economics 0304-3878 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32160 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Elsevier Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research Africa Nigeria
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PRACTICE MACHINE LEARNING BUSINESS PLAN BUSINESS SURVIVAL COMPETITIVENESS
spellingShingle	ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PRACTICE MACHINE LEARNING BUSINESS PLAN BUSINESS SURVIVAL COMPETITIVENESS McKenzie, David Sansone, Dario Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
geographic_facet	Africa Nigeria
description	We compare the absolute and relative performance of three approaches to predicting outcomes for entrants in a business plan competition in Nigeria: Business plan scores from judges, simple ad hoc prediction models used by researchers, and machine learning approaches. We find that i) business plan scores from judges are uncorrelated with business survival, employment, sales, or profits three years later; ii) a few key characteristics of entrepreneurs such as gender, age, ability, and business sector do have some predictive power for future outcomes; iii) modern machine learning methods do not offer noticeable improvements; iv) the overall predictive power of all approaches is very low, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of picking competition winners.
format	Journal Article
author	McKenzie, David Sansone, Dario
author_facet	McKenzie, David Sansone, Dario
author_sort	McKenzie, David
title	Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
title_short	Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
title_full	Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
title_fullStr	Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
title_full_unstemmed	Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria
title_sort	predicting entrepreneurial success is hard : evidence from a business plan competition in nigeria
publisher	Elsevier
publishDate	2019
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32160
_version_	1764475924697317376

Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard : Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria

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