Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs About Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
通过一项大型商业计划竞赛实验，调查获胜者和未获胜者对自己在相反情境下经营状况的信念，发现对照组对获胜概率的预期较准，但两组都高估了获胜对企业规模增长的帮助。
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.