such, the cost of delivery is comparatively very low.

While the SIYB program covers some of the same aggregate dimensions of business operation, such as record-keeping, stocking-up, marketing, and planning, the main difference with the handbook is that the latter provides locally relevant ordering of business practices within these broader categories. For instance, while the SIYB syllabus emphasizes all business practices associated with record-keeping as being important, the handbook selects and highlights only those record-keeping practices that have been shown (through the qualitative and quantitative process) to be profitable and locally relevant. Hence, rather than overwhelming business owners with a plethora of business practices that they should adopt, the handbook offers streamlined information on the most profitable practices for their local context.<sup>16</sup> In addition, the handbook offers locally relevant implementation norms and tips derived from the experiences of successful peers, and does so by using language and terminology that is native to the local context. By contrast, the SIYB curriculum is highly focused on standardized content and professional language, which may lead to a large disconnect with many

# **D.2 Documentary Movie**

The documentary movie used in this study provides emotional support and guidance to retail shop owners from a local set of highly successful business peers. These peers were selected from the initial pool of 102 qualitative survey participants. At the time of these interviews, we shortlisted nine local business owners who were ostensibly successful, had an organized shop and books, and employed the largest number of business practices in our study. Subsequently and in conjunction with the production of the handbook, we conducted further in-depth interviews with these owners about their personal business trajectory and about business practices and implementation advice they regarded as crucial to achieving business growth. We also wanted diversity in gender, age, and ethnicity to appeal to the different business owners in our sample. This heterogeneity is important since similarity cues based on these factors have been shown to facilitate social learning besides cues of success, competence, skill, and knowledge (see, e.g., Rendell et al., 2011; Efferson et al., 2008; Chudek et al., 2013; Henrich and Gil-White, 2001; Corriveau and Harris, 2009; McElreath et al., 2008).

This exercise resulted in a final set of five shop owners representing the local frontier of best practices in each business domain. Moreover, these shop owners regularly employed the practices in the same way featured in the handbook and agreed to describe their implementation methods and paths to success in a documentary. The movie featuring these five successful business owners was filmed on shop sites and edited in post-production by a professional media company hired by us. We were involved at each stage of implementation, including script development, test runs, filming, and post production. The end product was a 25 minute documentary movie.<sup>17</sup> This documentary movie was publicly screened in each of the 29 districts at a local school or other public space. All screening locations were central and accessible to all invited businesses. In order to increase attendance, shop owners were offered IDR 100,000 (USD 24.68 PPP) as a show-up fee and to compensate them for their time and transport expenses. In addition, we offered two

> 16As an illustration of the difference in terms of amount of information provided, the handbook covers 60 pages while the SIYB manual has more than 600 pages.

> 17The documentary can be accessed from here.

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