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 U.S. $50,000 each, is used to elicit ex-post beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the percent chance they wou...

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Main Author:	McKenzie, David
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Taylor and Francis 2019
Subjects:	BUSINESS GROWTH RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PLANS BUSINESS GRANTS FIRM ENTRY
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31139

id	okr-10986-31139
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-311392021-05-25T10:54:36Z Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status McKenzie, David BUSINESS GROWTH RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PLANS BUSINESS GRANTS FIRM ENTRY A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of U.S. $50,000 each, is used to elicit ex-post 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 their business surviving 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. 2019-01-10T21:11:29Z 2019-01-10T21:11:29Z 2017-06-20 Journal Article Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 0735-0015 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31139 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Taylor and Francis Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research Africa Nigeria
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	BUSINESS GROWTH RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PLANS BUSINESS GRANTS FIRM ENTRY
spellingShingle	BUSINESS GROWTH RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS PLANS BUSINESS GRANTS FIRM ENTRY McKenzie, David Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
geographic_facet	Africa Nigeria
description	A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of U.S. $50,000 each, is used to elicit ex-post 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 their business surviving 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.
format	Journal Article
author	McKenzie, David
author_facet	McKenzie, David
author_sort	McKenzie, David
title	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
title_short	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
title_full	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
title_fullStr	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
title_full_unstemmed	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
title_sort	can business owners form accurate counterfactuals? : eliciting treatment and control beliefs about their outcomes in the alternative treatment status
publisher	Taylor and Francis
publishDate	2019
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31139
_version_	1764473628991160320

Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status

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