Hypothesis
Low adoption of digital payments by small merchants in Jaipur is explained by supply-side barriers such as lack of bank accounts or smartphones, high fees or insufficient literacy.
What failed
A survey of 1,003 small fixed-location merchants found little evidence for supply-side barriers: merchants could obtain the needed infrastructure, platform fees were affordable and literacy was adequate, so adoption was feasible and cheap yet still low.
Broken assumption
Making digital payments cheaper and easier to access is what holds back merchant adoption.
Why
The authors point instead to demand-side factors, such as a perceived lack of customers wanting to pay digitally, and to worries that digital records would raise tax liability.
From the published paper: Ligon et al. PLoS ONE, 2019. ↗CC BY