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Externally Valid Policy Choice

Christopher Adjaho, Timothy Christensen

arXiv 11 May 2022 · Econometrics

arXiv:2205.05561 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning personalized treatment policies that are externally valid or generalizable: they perform well in other target populations besides the experimental (or training) population from which data are sampled. We first show that welfare-maximizing policies for the experimental population are robust to shifts in the distribution of outcomes (but not characteristics) between the experimental and target populations. We then develop new methods for learning policies that are robust to shifts in outcomes and characteristics. In doing so, we highlight how treatment effect heterogeneity within the experimental population affects the generalizability of policies. Our methods may be used with experimental or observational data (where treatment is endogenous). Many of our methods can be implemented with linear programming.

Citation extraction

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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
1Kido, D (2022) Distributionally robust policy learning with wasserstein distance1.00074100%
2Mo, W., Z. Qi, and Y. Liu (2021) Learning optimal distributionally robust individualized treatment rules1.00053100%
3Kitagawa, T. and A. Tetenov (2018) Who should be treated? empirical welfare maximization methods for treatment choice0.9285480%
4Athey, S. and S. Wager (2021) Policy learning with observational data0.92843100%
5Spini, P. E (2021) Robustness, heterogeneous treatment effects and covariate shifts0.92843100%
6Manski, C. F (2004) Statistical treatment rules for heterogeneous populations0.81142100%
7McKenzie, D. and S. Puerto (2021) Growing markets through business training for female entrepreneurs: A market-level randomized experiment in Kenya0.73732100%
8Mbakop, E. and M. Tabord-Meehan (2021) Model selection for treatment choice: Penalized welfare maximization0.73732100%
9Qian, M. and S. A. Murphy (2011) Performance guarantees for individualized treatment rules0.73732100%
10Si, N., F. Zhang, Z. Zhou, and J. Blanchet (2020) Distributionally robust policy evaluation and learning in offline contextual bandits0.73732100%

Showing the top 10 of 39 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
1Quantifying Distributional Model Risk in Marginal Problems via Optimal Transport0.946134
2Optimal treatment assignment rules under capacity constraints0.81142
3Nonparametric Bayesian Policy Learning0.73733
4Optimal Decision Rules Under Partial Identification0.40511
5Policy Learning with New Treatments0.40511
6Debiased Machine Learning of Aggregated Intersection Bounds and Other Causal Parameters0.40511
7On the Lower Confidence Band for the Optimal Welfare in Policy Learning0.40511
8Policy Learning under Unobserved Confounding: A Robust and Efficient Approach0.40511
9Distributionally Robust Treatment Effect0.40511
100.5 in Using Prior Studies to Design Experiments: An Empirical Bayes Approach0.40511