Business 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. …

Breaking The Shackles Of Poverty: How Bridging Ties Enable Subsistence Entrepreneurs To Upgrade Their Businesses To A Prosperous Level, Asifa Ilyas, Ralf Wagner

Subsistence Marketplaces

Subsistence entrepreneurs establish and run their business ventures under harsh economic and social conditions. These survival-driven businesses are impoverished and generate insufficient income for entrepreneurs and their families. Subsistence entrepreneurs can break this vicious poverty cycle by upscaling their ventures into more sustainable and profitable businesses. However, it is not clear what prevents these entrepreneurs from developing more prosperous and sustainable business ventures.

This study fills the gap by investigating the effect of bridging social ties on subsistence businesses' performance. Further, the study examines the impact of group identity, jealousy, gender, and power on subsistence entrepreneurs' efforts to build bridging …

Refereed Research - Impact Of Covid-19 On Subsistence Consumer-Merchants: A Study Of Tourism In The Himalayan Region, Sheetal Kapoor, Jigmet Wangdus, Shikha Upadhyaya

Subsistence Marketplaces

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global production and consumption patterns, affecting all anthropogenic activities. Findings from in-depth interviews with subsistence entrepreneurs in the Himalayan region highlight how the pandemic exacerbated the day-to-day challenges of the locals and the strategies they utilized to tackle uncertainties. Implications are derived for research and practice.

Key Words: Pandemic, tourism, subsistence consumer merchants (SCM), subsistence entrepreneurs