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Treatment Allocation with Strategic Agents

Evan Munro

arXiv 12 Nov 2020 · Econometrics · publishedManagement Science (2024) · 6 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2011.06528 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

There is increasing interest in allocating treatments based on observed individual characteristics: examples include targeted marketing, individualized credit offers, and heterogeneous pricing. Treatment personalization introduces incentives for individuals to modify their behavior to obtain a better treatment. Strategic behavior shifts the joint distribution of covariates and potential outcomes. The optimal rule without strategic behavior allocates treatments only to those with a positive Conditional Average Treatment Effect. With strategic behavior, we show that the optimal rule can involve randomization, allocating treatments with less than 100% probability even to those who respond positively on average to the treatment. We propose a sequential experiment based on Bayesian Optimization that converges to the optimal treatment rule without parametric assumptions on individual strategic behavior.

Citation extraction

69
references
109
in-text mentions
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 77% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Alex Frankel and Navin Kartik (2022) Improving information from manipulable data0.92843100%
2Charles F Manski (2004) Statistical treatment rules for heterogeneous populations0.87472100%
3Benjamin Letham, Brian Karrer, Guilherme Ottoni, and Eytan Bakshy (2019) Constrained bayesian optimization with noisy experiments0.81142100%
4Christopher Adjaho and Timothy Christensen (2022) Externally valid treatment choice0.73732100%
5Saba Ahmadi, Hedyeh Beyhaghi, Avrim Blum, and Keziah Naggita (2021) The strategic perceptron0.73732100%
6Jinshuo Dong, Aaron Roth, Zachary Schutzman, Bo Waggoner, and Zhiwei… (2018) Strategic classification from revealed preferences0.73732100%
7Nathan Kallus and Angela Zhou (2021) Minimax-optimal policy learning under unobserved confounding0.73732100%
8Jasper Snoek, Hugo Larochelle, and Ryan P Adams (2012) Practical bayesian optimization of machine learning algorithms0.73732100%
9Niranjan Srinivas, Andreas Krause, Sham Kakade, and Matthias Seeger (2010) Gaussian process optimization in the bandit setting: No regret and experimental design0.64441100%
10Yiling Chen, Yang Liu, and Chara Podimata (2020) Learning strategy-aware linear classifiers0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 69 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Incorporating Preferences Into Treatment Assignment Problems0.87452
2Policy Learning with Competing Agents0.58531
3Externally Valid Policy Choice0.40511
4Robust Network Targeting with Multiple Nash Equilibria0.40511
5Leave No One Undermined: Policy Targeting with Regret Aversion0.40511