Student Subjective Beliefs of Production Functions

We will elicit beliefs about skill augmenting production function inputs through vignettes. We will show college students a description of a hypothetical classmate's weekly effort investment across different inputs. We will then ask college students to give us their best guess of their hypothetical classmates starting salary at graduation.
Before this elicitation we will also ask a series of background questions to understand their consideration set of skill augmenting efforts and their baseline characteristics.

We will conduct heterogeneity analysis based on whether the student is first-generation or continuing-generation college going students. The goal of the experiment is to test whether these two different groups of college students have different consideration sets and subjective beliefs on returns of actions that help them increase their expected salary.

The hypothetical scenario will present this hypothetical classmate's efforts in terms of hours dedicated to various actions: studying, joining club activities and so on.

In this way we can determine elasticity of effort in specific actions with respect to their expected wages.

2025-09-08

2025-11-15

1)Expected wages in dollar amount 2) list of actions taken by college students (e.g. networking, studying...)

Descriptives on: 1) career advice 2) major switching 3) career plans

We will recruit current college students on Prolific. We will then elicit a series of baseline characteristics and past choices.
After that we will elicit their consideration sets and subjective beliefs.

We will recruit 1,000 current college students in the US from Prolific. These students will be directed to a Qualtrics survey.
In the survey they will be first asked about their demographic characteristics, their past career and college choices, and finally their current expectations of career.
We will then ask them what activities they are currently using in order to maximize their chances at landing a job and maximize future income.
After that we will show each student a series of 4 vignettes that describe a hypothetical student from their same college. The description will include amount of hours dedicated to a series of activities. An example of the set of actions and hours is the following: "40 hours between studying, working with faculty outside of class, interview prep (writing CVs, resumes, preparing interview responses), and then 5 hours between talking to new alumni and employees at firms they are interested in, professional club activities, and reaching out to on-campus resources (career services, mentoring professionals, so on)"

We will then ask how much they expect this college student to make at their first job.

We will drop observations from:
1) accounts that Prolific deem being bots or AI
2) Responses that include that indicate $0 as expected wage
3) Responses below 3 minutes if this falls outside of 2std from the mean completed time

Within-randomization: order of input level will be randomized as to follow latin square design

Individual level within randomization

No

Target sample is 1,000-1,200 college students based on attrition and outcomes of attention checks

Target sample is 1,000-1,200 college students based on attrition and outcomes of attention checks

Target sample is 1,000-1,200 college students based on attrition and outcomes of attention checks