Causal Inference from Hypothetical Evaluations

Thank you to seminar and conference participants for helpful comments. Detailed suggestions from Richard Carson and Laura Taylor were especially helpful. This paper is related to a previous working paper, “Non-Choice Evaluations Predict Behavioral Responses to Changes in Economic Conditions,” by Bernheim, Björkegren, Naecker, and Antonio Rangel; it uses data from the same lab experiment, but most of the methodological analysis is new, as is the field application. We are grateful to Antonio Rangel for his contributions to the earlier project and to Irina Weisbrott for assistance with collecting the laboratory data. Bernheim acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation through grant SES-1156263. Björkegren thanks the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship at Stanford University, and Microsoft Research for support. Pollmann was supported generously by the B.F. Haley and E.S. Shaw Fellowship for Economics through a grant to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The components of this study were overseen by the IRBs of Stanford University or Brown University. The field experiment in this study was pre-registered with the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0004885); the lab experiment was conducted prior to the establishment of the registry. An accompanying R package is available on Github: https://github.com/michaelpollmann/hypeRest. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix

• January 5, 2022
• December 17, 2024