Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 17, 2026

Combining Behavioral Endocrinology and Experimental Economics: Testosterone and Social Decision Making
Published on: March 2, 2011
Certification or cash prize: the heterogeneous effect of venture competitions
Gaétan de Rassenfosse1, Matthias van den Heuvel2
1College of Management of Technology, Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Abstract:
Venture competitions usually reward winners with a certification of their startup's quality and a cash prize. We model and estimate the impact of these rewards on startups' performances using original data on about 1000 startups that have participated in the leading Swiss venture competition. We find that winning in the competition improves startups' business success on average. However, it does not affect all startups equally. Certification has a long-term positive effect on startups whose quality can be reliably assessed by the competition's judges. The cash prize, however, only has a short-term impact on startups with low running costs.
Related Concept Videos
Competition
Confidence Coefficient
Equity Theory
Comparing Experimental Results: Student's t-Test
Significance Testing: Overview
Multiple Comparison Tests
It would be easy to compare two samples using a significance alpha level of 0.05. In other words, there is only one sample pair to be compared. However, it would be difficult to identify a significantly different sample if the number...