Can Business Owners form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of US$50,000 each, is used to elicit beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participa...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/05/26363171/can-business-owners-form-accurate-counterfactuals-eliciting-treatment-control-beliefs-outcomes-alternative-treatment-status http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24505 |
| Summary: | A survey of participants in a
large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which
winners received an average of US$50,000 each, is used to
elicit beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in
the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the
percent chance they would be operating a firm, and the
number of employees and monthly sales they would have, had
their treatment status been reversed. The study finds the
control group to have reasonably accurate expectations of
the large treatment effect they would experience on the
likelihood of operating a firm, although this may reflect
the treatment effect being close to an upper bound. The
control group dramatically overestimates how much winning
would help them grow the size of their firm. The treatment
group overestimates how much winning helps their chance of
running a business, and also overestimates how much winning
helps them grow their firms. In addition, these
counterfactual expectations appear unable to generate
accurate relative rankings of which groups of participants
benefit most from treatment. |
|---|