Sharp bounds for within-household encouragement designs with interference

Santiago Acerenza, Julian Martinez-Iriarte, Alejandro S\'anchez-Becerra and Pietro Emilio Spini

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Abstract: Experiments with spillovers create incentives for strategic behavior: when one household member's treatment can affect another, take-up decisions become interdependent. We propose an instrumental-variables framework grounded in game theory, in which take-up is a Nash equilibrium among a small number of agents, and all variables are discrete. Under minimal assumptions, without specifying how equilibria are selected, we derive sharp non-parametric bounds for direct, indirect, offer-mediated, and policy-targeting effects. Game-theoretic restrictions such as supermodularity, symmetry, and dominance can be layered on via a tractable linear program, and we characterize when each does or does not tighten the identified set. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach to study household experiments by reanalyzing a banking intervention in Kenya.

Date: 2025-03, Revised 2026-10
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