ABSTRACT Revenue‐based lending (RBL) has emerged as a prominent alternative to traditional fixed‐term debt for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), whose survival often depends on operational resilience, defined as the ability to maintain essential business functions under demand volatility, liquidity shocks, and external disruptions. Because SMEs frequently face severe credit frictions, short cash‐to‐cash cycles, and limited access to traditional operational buffers, timely and predictable financing can create financial slack that helps them absorb short‐term disruptions. In RBL, repayment is tied to realized revenue, but the resilience benefits of this model depend on a stable and responsive supply of investor capital. Drawing on behavioral operations, investor psychology, and OM research on financial slack, we examine whether investor‐directed digital nudges can increase investor engagement and, through more timely and reliable capital flows, strengthen SME operational resilience. Collaborating with a major RBL platform in Asia, we conduct a large‐scale randomized field experiment in which investors are randomly assigned to one of five messages: (i) cooperative social‐value message (ii) competitive social‐value message, (iii) precommitment message designed to mitigate time‐inconsistent preferences, (iv) ease‐and‐convenience message designed to reduce perceived cognitive costs, or a plain message control that accounts for attention effects. Our results show that the ease‐and‐convenience‐framed nudge significantly increases investor engagement, leading to more timely and predictable funding aligned with SMEs' operational needs. These improved capital flows reduce delinquency and shorten payoff durations, suggesting that investor‐side nudges can strengthen borrower resilience by creating financial slack that helps SMEs maintain operational continuity under cash‐flow pressure. Our empirical evidence combines an investor‐side online experiment, a borrower‐side mechanism experiment, and semi‐structured interviews with SME borrowers. Together, these analyses show that ease‐and‐convenience messaging is especially effective for long‐tenured, risk‐averse, institutionally affiliated, and urban‐based investors, while borrower‐side evidence suggests that financial slack is the most strongly supported borrower‐side mechanism through which timely and predictable funding helps SMEs absorb short‐term shocks, meet urgent operating obligations, and maintain repayment continuity. By documenting how investor‐side nudges generate cross‐side benefits for SME borrowers through financial slack and buffering, this study advances behavioral operations research on context‐dependent nudging, extends OM work on platform‐mediated resilience, and offers guidance for fintech platforms seeking to stabilize capital flows to vulnerable SMEs.
Chung et al. (Tue,) studied this question.