Policy Learning with New Treatments

Samuel Higbee

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: I study the problem of a decision maker choosing a policy which allocates treatment to a heterogeneous population on the basis of experimental data that includes only a subset of possible treatment values. The effects of new treatments are partially identified by shape restrictions on treatment response. Policies are compared according to the minimax regret criterion, and I show that the empirical analog of the population decision problem has a tractable linear- and integer-programming formulation. I prove the maximum regret of the estimated policy converges to the lowest possible maximum regret at a rate which is the maximum of N^-1/2 and the rate at which conditional average treatment effects are estimated in the experimental data. I apply my results to design targeted subsidies for electrical grid connections in rural Kenya, and estimate that 97% of the population should be given a treatment not implemented in the experiment.

Date: 2022-10, Revised 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-ecm and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04703 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2210.04703

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().