Policy design in experiments with unknown interference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Viviano, Davide, Rudder, Jess
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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author Viviano, Davide
Rudder, Jess
author_facet Viviano, Davide
Rudder, Jess
contents This paper studies experimental designs for estimation and inference on policies with spillover effects. Units are organized into a finite number of large clusters and interact in unknown ways within each cluster. First, we introduce a single-wave experiment that, by varying the randomization across cluster pairs, estimates the marginal effect of a change in treatment probabilities, taking spillover effects into account. Using the marginal effect, we propose a test for policy optimality. Second, we design a multiple-wave experiment to estimate welfare-maximizing treatment rules. We provide strong theoretical guarantees and an implementation in a large-scale field experiment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2011_08174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Policy design in experiments with unknown interference
Viviano, Davide
Rudder, Jess
Econometrics
Machine Learning
Methodology
This paper studies experimental designs for estimation and inference on policies with spillover effects. Units are organized into a finite number of large clusters and interact in unknown ways within each cluster. First, we introduce a single-wave experiment that, by varying the randomization across cluster pairs, estimates the marginal effect of a change in treatment probabilities, taking spillover effects into account. Using the marginal effect, we propose a test for policy optimality. Second, we design a multiple-wave experiment to estimate welfare-maximizing treatment rules. We provide strong theoretical guarantees and an implementation in a large-scale field experiment.
title Policy design in experiments with unknown interference
topic Econometrics
Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.08174