Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

Learning From Subsistence Marketplaces And Beyond: A Cross-Sectoral Comparison In Benin, Paul Ingenbleek, Souleimane A. Adekambi, Hans C.M. Van Trijp

Subsistence Marketplaces

Subsistence Marketplaces publishes studies that study consumers, entrepreneurs, and marketplaces from a broad range of low income contexts in their own right, transcending the boundaries between sectors and disciplines to derive practically meaningful implications. This paper contributes to accomplishing the mission of the new journal by contextualizing market learning theory to subsistence marketplaces. More specifically, the study links two modes of market learning (exploration and exploitation) with producers’ livelihood performance. It hypothesizes that within subsistence marketplaces, producers benefit the most from exploration but to seize a market opportunity beyond the subsistence context, BoP producers should strengthen their exploitative learning processes. …