More Money, Same Bottleneck
The Georgian demand experiment did more than show that a buyer can induce online selling. By comparing a roughly $130 order with one worth $780, it asked why some firms still did not act when the prospective reward became much larger. This chapter uses the study’s adoption model to separate setup costs, organizational hassle, recurring obligations, and expected market benefit, then applies that model to the dose result. The conclusion is not that money is irrelevant; it is that more money was not clearly the marginal solution for the firms that remained outside the market.
Adoption is a decision with several moving parts
A small firm’s choice to open an online sales channel can be represented as a comparison between the value it expects to receive and the costs it must bear. The expected value includes the possibility of reaching customers or receiving orders over time. The costs include the one-time work of creating a profile and onboarding, the continuing work of maintaining the channel, and a less visible burden: the organizational hassle of coordinating a new way of selling while existing business continues.
The paper’s framework calls the technical and setup component the implementation cost. It includes skills, setup time, and onboarding. It calls the non-monetary burden organizational inertia, including procrastination and limited managerial bandwidth. These categories are not labels for different kinds of people. They are different ways in which the same firm can fail to move from intention to action. A business may have enough money to pay for setup but not enough attention to gather product information, arrange payment, and keep the process moving before the opportunity disappears.
Recurring maintenance creates a second decision after entry. A firm may complete the initial setup and still have to update information, answer customers, process payments, arrange delivery, and decide whether the continuing return justifies the work. The first decision is whether to cross the entry threshold. The second is whether the channel remains worth operating. Treating both as one adoption event makes it difficult to tell whether a program created a functioning market relationship or merely prompted a one-time experiment.
The intervention logic can be understood against these components. Training is intended to lower implementation cost. It may make the technical process easier or reduce uncertainty about how to begin. A conditional demand shock changes the other side of the calculation. It provides a one-time order profit and a deadline. The order raises the immediate expected benefit; the deadline can reduce the opportunity to postpone the work. The shock does not necessarily remove the setup or maintenance burden. It changes the circumstances under which the firm weighs that burden.
This distinction matters because a course and an order can produce different kinds of failure. If a firm does not know how to create an online presence, training may be relevant but demand alone could leave the firm unable to fulfill the opportunity. If a firm knows the steps but sees no likely customer, training may add little until a buyer appears.