Experimental Design Details
Outcomes:
Experiment 1: Email Correspondence Test
Test:
First order effect: gender, race, education, startup comparative advantages (startup quality)
Interaction Effect: gender by race, gender by education, gender by quality, and other interaction effects
Heterogeneous effect: we will replicate Gornall and Strebulav (2019)’s heterogeneous effect. Specifically, heterogeneous effect along investors’ gender, education, fund size, age.
Experiment 2: Investor-side IRR experiment
Test:
First order effect: all the randomized characteristics of the startups will be tested. All the measurements from the four questions asked for each profile will be used as the outcome variable. Specifically, we want to test the effect of gender, race, age, education and comparative advantages (startup quality)
Interaction Effect: gender by race, gender by education, gender by quality, gender by age and other interaction effects
Heterogeneous effect: if the sample size is large enough, we will check heterogeneous effect along all the demographic dimension of the investors
Dictator Game: use the donated money as the main outcome variables to disentangle the taste-based discrimination.
Experiment 3: Startup-side IRR experiment
Test:
First order effect: all the randomized characteristics of the investors will be tested. All the measurements from the four questions asked for each profile will be used as the outcome variable. Specifically, we want to test the effect of gender, race, education and experience (investor quality)
Interaction Effect: gender by race, gender by education, gender by quality, and other interaction effects
Heterogeneous effect: if the sample size is large enough, we will check heterogeneous effect along all the demographic dimension of the investors (i.e gender)
Follow-up experiment: use the rating and satisfaction rate as the main outcome variables to test the homophily channel of startups’ fund seeking behaviors.
Detailed regressions are described in the attached files.