Claim LD04-SL-C02 (v1.0)
In a field experiment with 640 Kenyan small-business owners, a GPT-4 business adviser on WhatsApp had no average effect on revenue or profit, but its effect for owners who started below the median was more than 0.20 standard deviations lower than for those above it.
Provenance and status
- Claim type
- ESTIMATE (as printed: “ESTIMATE”)
- Publication status
- ELIGIBLE (QUALIFIED) (as printed: “ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER”)
- Verification state
- CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY (as printed: “CONTENT VERIFIED”; verified by: UNKNOWN)
- Does not license
- A general rule that AI widens gaps; the high-performer gain as established (the authors hedge it)
- Source (field 6, as printed)
- Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026
- Source type (field 7)
- PEER_REVIEWED_JOURNAL_ARTICLE (as printed: “Peer-reviewed journal article”)
- Institutional position
- Independent academic
- Maturity (claim evidence / publication maturity)
- EMERGING (as printed: “EMERGING”)
- Recorded date
- 2026-10-14
- Currentness / correction
- This is the current version. No correction or concern relation is recorded on its Sources.
Version
Pinned version v1.0 (entry LD04-SL-C02--v1.0) — this page never floats to newer evidence.
This pinned version is also the current version.
Pinned Sources (field 6, version-specific)
- “Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026” → SRC-SL-OTIS-CLARKE-DELECOURT-HOLTZ-KONING-MNSC-2026--v1.0 — Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026; class PEER_REVIEWED_JOURNAL_ARTICLE (explicit public provenance pin)
All 25 canonical Claim fields (raw values and normalized values)
| # | Canonical field | Canonical value (verbatim) | Normalized (Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CLAIM ID | LD04-SL-C02 | — |
| 2 | PUBLIC-FACING CLAIM | In a field experiment with 640 Kenyan small-business owners, a GPT-4 business adviser on WhatsApp had no average effect on revenue or profit, but its effect for owners who started below the median was more than 0.20 standard deviations lower than for those above it. | — |
| 3 | CLAIM TYPE | ESTIMATE | base_types: ESTIMATE |
| 4 | RESEARCH STRAND | A — Performance while the tool is in use | — |
| 5 | MATURITY | EMERGING | states: EMERGING |
| 6 | SOURCE | Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026 | source_ids: SRC-SL-OTIS-CLARKE-DELECOURT-HOLTZ-KONING-MNSC-2026 |
| 7 | SOURCE TYPE | Peer-reviewed journal article | classes: PEER_REVIEWED_JOURNAL_ARTICLE |
| 8 | INSTITUTIONAL POSITION | Independent academic | — |
| 9 | SCOPE | Small-business owners in 44 of Kenya’s 47 counties; May–November 2023 | — |
| 10 | DESIGN | Randomized field experiment, about five months | — |
| 11 | SAMPLE / DATASET | 640 entrepreneurs | — |
| 12 | MODEL / TOOL / VERSION | GPT-4 assistant delivered through WhatsApp | — |
| 13 | COMPARATOR | Entrepreneurs without the AI assistant (control-arm details not reported here) | — |
| 14 | MAIN RESULT | No average effect on revenue or profit; below-median baseline performers did more than 0.20 SD worse relative to above-median ones; the abstract describes low performers as nearly 10% worse and high performers as possibly over 15% better | — |
| 15 | INFERENTIAL TARGET | Heterogeneity of business performance by baseline performance | — |
| 16 | DOES NOT LICENSE | A general rule that AI widens gaps; the high-performer gain as established (the authors hedge it) | — |
| 17 | VERIFICATION STATE | CONTENT VERIFIED | state: CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY · verified_by: UNKNOWN |
| 18 | LIMITATIONS | One country, one tool and one period; the paper frames the low-performer loss as nearly 10% in the abstract and about 0.08 in the body; the authors find no difference in questions asked or advice received, only in what owners did with it | — |
| 19 | CONTRADICTORY / SUPPORTING SOURCES | Runs against compression findings on well-specified tasks; consistent with other widening results on open-ended tasks | — |
| 20 | GEOGRAPHY / LANGUAGE | Kenya / Not checked | — |
| 21 | DISTRIBUTIONAL LEDGER | High performers made tailored changes; low performers adopted generic advice such as price cuts and more advertising | — |
| 22 | R01 / FIELD-MAP LINKS | LD-04, D2 | — |
| 23 | WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS CLAIM? | Replications in other countries or with other tools that find compression on comparable open-ended business decisions | — |
| 24 | PUBLICATION STATUS | ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER | state: ELIGIBLE · qualifiers: QUALIFIED |
| 25 | RECORDED DATE | 2026-10-14 | — |
Field 22 references resolved against Field Map v0.2: LD-04 (LIVING_DEBATE); D2 (DOMAIN)
Cited by Living Debate versions
Research-of-record provenance
Materialized by sociolens-materializer 0.6.0 at 2026-09-28T20:00:00.000Z; normalization contract SocioLens — Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2 — Pre-Spike Materialization Contract (v1.0.2). Content seal SHA-256 72621f480a54521e605b1a5ee15527d77b34bdb96b36fdd7be9a1bcc4dde93e8.
Repository-authored inputs (not Drive exports)
- SocioLens claim — LD04-SL-C02 v1.0 (v1.0) — written in the SocioLens repository by Project Lead (Claude, AI) on 2026-10-14; no Drive identity exists. Authority: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 14 October 2026 to build the LD-04 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-04 source notes, checked against full texts or official abstracts. Block “ENTRY 02 — LD04-SL-C02” SHA-256
648c11722b33738a84434cb405ddbf3d601ffde874cc6dd24fe15e58c6d42713; fixturefixtures/authored/claims/LD04-SL-C02--v1.0.
Builder decisions (not Drive data)
- VERSION = v1.0 — basis: Claim version taken from the repository-authored claim fixture version (SocioLens claim — LD04-SL-C02 v1.0); the first version of a new Claim of the LD-04 debate
- CURRENT_POINTER = true — basis: repository-authored claim "SocioLens claim — LD04-SL-C02 v1.0" (Project Lead (Claude, AI), 2026-10-14); basis: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 14 October 2026 to build the LD-04 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-04 source notes, checked against full texts or official abstracts
- FIELD_6_SOURCE_REFERENCE = SRC-SL-OTIS-CLARKE-DELECOURT-HOLTZ-KONING-MNSC-2026--v1.0 — basis: field 6 of ENTRY 02 — LD04-SL-C02 cites "Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026"; the only field-6 segment of this ClaimVersion's repository-authored ledger block.
- SOURCE_PROVENANCE_PIN = SRC-SL-OTIS-CLARKE-DELECOURT-HOLTZ-KONING-MNSC-2026--v1.0 — basis: explicit version-pinned public provenance of this ClaimVersion (Amendment v1.2 §6): the pinned field-6 Source record "Otis, Clarke, Delecourt, Holtz & Koning, “The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya,” Management Science, 2026".