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

McKenzie, David

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: EXPENDITURE;    ADVERTISING EXPENDITURES;    PHONE;    EMPLOYMENT;    GRANT;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7668
RP-ID  :  WPS7668

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

A survey of participants in alarge-scale business plan competition experiment, in whichwinners received an average of US$50,000 each, is used toelicit beliefs about what the outcomes would have been inthe alternative treatment status. Participants are asked thepercent chance they would be operating a firm, and thenumber of employees and monthly sales they would have, hadtheir treatment status been reversed. The study finds thecontrol group to have reasonably accurate expectations ofthe large treatment effect they would experience on thelikelihood of operating a firm, although this may reflectthe treatment effect being close to an upper bound. Thecontrol group dramatically overestimates how much winningwould help them grow the size of their firm. The treatmentgroup overestimates how much winning helps their chance ofrunning a business, and also overestimates how much winninghelps them grow their firms. In addition, thesecounterfactual expectations appear unable to generateaccurate relative rankings of which groups of participantsbenefit most from treatment.