Adaptive Natural Experiment

An adaptive natural experiment combines the causal logic of the natural experiment — exploiting real-world events that assign individuals to conditions in a plausibly exogenous way — with pre-specified adaptive monitoring rules that allow the analytic protocol to be modified based on accumulating data. This hybrid design is used in economics, epidemiology, and policy evaluation when the natural event unfolds over time and interim evidence can legitimately inform decisions about data collection scope, subgroup focus, or analytic strategy without compromising causal validity.