 Statistical treatment choice based on asymmetric minimax regret criteriaJournal of Econometrics, 2012, vol. 166, issue 1, 157-165 Abstract: This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the planner’s treatment choice for the population, based on regret, which is the expected welfare loss due to assigning inferior treatments. I extend previous work started by Manski (2004) that applied the minimax regret criterion to treatment choice problems by considering decision criteria that asymmetrically treat Type I regret (due to mistakenly choosing an inferior new treatment) and Type II regret (due to mistakenly rejecting a superior innovation) and derive exact finite sample solutions to these problems for experiments with normal, Bernoulli and bounded distributions of outcomes. The paper also evaluates the properties of treatment choice and sample size selection based on classical hypothesis tests and power calculations in terms of regret. Keywords: Treatment effects; Loss aversion; Statistical decision theory; Hypothesis testing (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:econom:v:166:y:2012:i:1:p:157-165 DOI: 10.1016/j.jeconom.2011.06.013 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Econometrics is currently edited by T. Amemiya, A. R. Gallant, J. F. Geweke, C. Hsiao and P. M. Robinson More articles in Journal of Econometrics from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.