Study Overview
We study the impacts of an entrepreneurship business training on negotiation skills. The Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program is 3-week mini-MBA for youth who just graduated secondary school in Uganda. SEED was implemented as an at scale Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) and presented two separate curricula. The hard skills MBA featured a mix of approximately 75% hard-skills and 25% soft-skills; the soft-skills curriculum had the reverse mix. Only youth in the Soft SEED arm received explicit training in communication, negotiation, and persuasion. Four years after the intervention, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment and collected speech-to-text data as youth engaged in incentivized negotiation involving financing and start dates for a possible sale agreement. Study participants in the soft SEED group struck better deals than the control and hard SEED groups. Leveraging large language model (LLM) annotation, we investigate how negotiation strategies profiles differ across experimental groups. Preliminary results suggest that youth in the soft SEED group adopted more aggressive stances in their initial offers; their communication style was more assertive, but they were also more able to manage disagreement, avoiding communication breakdowns. Future work will provide richer characterization of study participants' negotiation profiles by examining win-win strategies, which were an explicit focus of the soft SEED training.
IBSI Initiative or Center: Lab for Inclusive FinTech (LIFT)