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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09187 |
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| _version_ | 1866914011828715520 |
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| author | Olea, José Luis Montiel Prallon, Brenda Qiu, Chen Stoye, Jörg Sun, Yiwei |
| author_facet | Olea, José Luis Montiel Prallon, Brenda Qiu, Chen Stoye, Jörg Sun, Yiwei |
| contents | We present a decision-theoretic justification for viewing the question of how to best choose where to experiment in order to optimize external validity as a $k$-median problem, a popular problem in computer science and operations research. We present conditions under which minimizing the worst-case, welfare-based regret among all nonrandom schemes that select $k$ sites to experiment is approximately equal - and sometimes exactly equal - to finding the k most central vectors of baseline site-level covariates. The k-median problem can be formulated as a linear integer program. Two empirical applications illustrate the theoretical and computational benefits of the suggested procedure. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09187 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Externally Valid Selection of Experimental Sites via the k-Median Problem Olea, José Luis Montiel Prallon, Brenda Qiu, Chen Stoye, Jörg Sun, Yiwei Econometrics We present a decision-theoretic justification for viewing the question of how to best choose where to experiment in order to optimize external validity as a $k$-median problem, a popular problem in computer science and operations research. We present conditions under which minimizing the worst-case, welfare-based regret among all nonrandom schemes that select $k$ sites to experiment is approximately equal - and sometimes exactly equal - to finding the k most central vectors of baseline site-level covariates. The k-median problem can be formulated as a linear integer program. Two empirical applications illustrate the theoretical and computational benefits of the suggested procedure. |
| title | Externally Valid Selection of Experimental Sites via the k-Median Problem |
| topic | Econometrics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09187 |