Certified Decisions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Andrews, Isaiah, Chen, Jiafeng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Andrews, Isaiah
Chen, Jiafeng
author_facet Andrews, Isaiah
Chen, Jiafeng
contents Hypothesis tests and confidence intervals are ubiquitous in empirical research, yet their connection to subsequent decision-making is often unclear. We develop a theory of certified decisions that pairs recommended decisions with inferential guarantees. Specifically, we attach P-certificates -- upper bounds on loss that hold with probability at least $1-α$ -- to recommended actions. We show that such certificates allow "safe," risk-controlling adoption decisions for ambiguity-averse downstream decision-makers. We further prove that it is without loss to limit attention to P-certificates arising as minimax decisions over confidence sets, or what Manski (2021) terms "as-if decisions with a set estimate." A parallel argument applies to E-certified decisions obtained from e-values in settings with unbounded loss.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17830
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Certified Decisions
Andrews, Isaiah
Chen, Jiafeng
Econometrics
Theoretical Economics
Statistics Theory
Hypothesis tests and confidence intervals are ubiquitous in empirical research, yet their connection to subsequent decision-making is often unclear. We develop a theory of certified decisions that pairs recommended decisions with inferential guarantees. Specifically, we attach P-certificates -- upper bounds on loss that hold with probability at least $1-α$ -- to recommended actions. We show that such certificates allow "safe," risk-controlling adoption decisions for ambiguity-averse downstream decision-makers. We further prove that it is without loss to limit attention to P-certificates arising as minimax decisions over confidence sets, or what Manski (2021) terms "as-if decisions with a set estimate." A parallel argument applies to E-certified decisions obtained from e-values in settings with unbounded loss.
title Certified Decisions
topic Econometrics
Theoretical Economics
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17830