Decision Theory for Treatment Choice Problems with Partial Identification

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Olea, José Luis Montiel, Qiu, Chen, Stoye, Jörg
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912443046821888
author Olea, José Luis Montiel
Qiu, Chen
Stoye, Jörg
author_facet Olea, José Luis Montiel
Qiu, Chen
Stoye, Jörg
contents We apply classical statistical decision theory to a large class of treatment choice problems with partial identification. We show that, in a general class of problems with Gaussian likelihood, all decision rules are admissible; it is maximin-welfare optimal to ignore all data; and, for severe enough partial identification, there are infinitely many minimax-regret optimal decision rules, all of which sometimes randomize the policy recommendation. We uniquely characterize the minimax-regret optimal rule that least frequently randomizes, and show that, in some cases, it can outperform other minimax-regret optimal rules in terms of what we term profiled regret. We analyze the implications of our results in the aggregation of experimental estimates for policy adoption, extrapolation of Local Average Treatment Effects, and policy making in the presence of omitted variable bias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_17623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decision Theory for Treatment Choice Problems with Partial Identification
Olea, José Luis Montiel
Qiu, Chen
Stoye, Jörg
Econometrics
We apply classical statistical decision theory to a large class of treatment choice problems with partial identification. We show that, in a general class of problems with Gaussian likelihood, all decision rules are admissible; it is maximin-welfare optimal to ignore all data; and, for severe enough partial identification, there are infinitely many minimax-regret optimal decision rules, all of which sometimes randomize the policy recommendation. We uniquely characterize the minimax-regret optimal rule that least frequently randomizes, and show that, in some cases, it can outperform other minimax-regret optimal rules in terms of what we term profiled regret. We analyze the implications of our results in the aggregation of experimental estimates for policy adoption, extrapolation of Local Average Treatment Effects, and policy making in the presence of omitted variable bias.
title Decision Theory for Treatment Choice Problems with Partial Identification
topic Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17623