Optimal treatment assignment rules under capacity constraints
Keita Sunada and
Kohei Izumi
Papers from arXiv.org
Abstract:
We study treatment assignment problems under capacity constraints, where a planner aims to maximize social welfare by assigning treatments based on observable covariates. Such constraints, common when treatments are costly or limited in supply, introduce nontrivial challenges for deriving optimal statistical assignment rules because the planner needs to coordinate treatment assignment probabilities across the entire covariate distribution. To address these challenges, we reformulate the planner's constrained maximization problem as an optimal transport problem, which makes the problem effectively unconstrained. We then establish local asymptotic optimality results of assignment rules using a limits of experiments framework. Finally, we illustrate our method with a voucher assignment problem for private secondary school attendance using data from Angrist et al. (2006)
Date: 2025-06, Revised 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12225 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:2506.12225
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().