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Policy Learning with Confidence

Victor Chernozhukov, Sokbae Lee, Adam M. Rosen, Liyang Sun

arXiv 15 Feb 2025 · Econometrics

arXiv:2502.10653 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper introduces a framework for selecting policies that maximize expected welfare under estimation uncertainty. The proposed method explicitly balances the size of the estimated welfare against the uncertainty inherent in its estimation, ensuring that chosen policies meet a reporting guarantee, namely, that actual welfare is guaranteed not to fall below the reported estimate with a pre-specified confidence level. We produce the efficient decision frontier, describing policies that offer maximum estimated welfare for a given acceptable level of estimation risk. We apply this approach to a variety of settings, including the selection of policy rules that allocate individuals to treatments and the allocation of limited budgets among competing social programs.

Citation extraction

55
references
90
in-text mentions
55
distinct cited
2
self-citations
6,494
main-text words

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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
1Chernozhukov, Lee and Rosen (2013) Intersection Bounds: Estimation and Inference self0.92843100%
2Manski (2021) Econometrics for Decision Making: Building on Foundations Sketched by Wald and Haavelmo0.87452100%
3Athey and Wager (2021) Policy Learning with Observational Data0.81142100%
4Kitagawa and Tetenov (2018) Who Should Be Treated? Empirical Welfare Maximization Methods for Treatment Choice0.81142100%
5Andrews and Chen (2025) Certified Decisions0.81142100%
6Ben-Michael, Greiner, Imai and Jiang (2025) Safe Policy Learning through Extrapolation: Application to Pre-Trial Risk Assessment0.73732100%
7Chernozhukov, Chetverikov and Koike (2023) Nearly optimal central limit theorem and bootstrap approximations in high dimensions0.64422100%
8Chernozhukov, Chetverikov, Kato and Koike (2022) Improved central limit theorem and bootstrap approximations in high dimensions0.64422100%
9Chernozhukov, Chetverikov, Kato and Koike (2023) High-dimensional data bootstrap0.64422100%
10Andrews, Kitagawa and McCloskey (2024) Inference on winners0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 55 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
1Dynamically Consistent Statistical Decisions0.84333
2Certified Decisions0.73732
3Winner's Curse Drives False Promises in Data-Driven Decisions: A Case Study in Refugee Matching0.73732
4Nonparametric Bayesian Policy Learning0.64422
5On the Lower Confidence Band for the Optimal Welfare in Policy Learning0.51121
6Optimal Policy Choices Under Uncertainty0.51121
72.5cm When and How to Pilot: Design Rules for Two-Wave Experiments0.51121
8Nonparametric Uniform Inference in Binary Classification and Policy Values0.40511
9Policy Learning with Observational Data : The Case of Hepatitis C Treatment for HIV/HCV Co-Infected Patients0.40511
10Robust Inference for Weighted Estimands0.00011