Pilot Natural Experiment — Feasibility Testing Before a Full Natural Experiment

A pilot natural experiment is a small-scale preliminary study that exploits an existing exogenous event or policy variation to test whether a full natural experiment is viable. It preserves the core logic of natural experiments — using real-world discontinuities to approximate causal inference — while explicitly scoping the work to assess data availability, group comparability, effect detectability, and procedural feasibility before committing resources to a larger study.