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Equality-Minded Treatment Choice

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  • Toru Kitagawa
  • Aleksey Tetenov

Abstract

The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income is infeasible. This article develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assignment policy based on observable individual covariates when the policy objective is to maximize an equality-minded rank-dependent social welfare function, which puts higher weight on individuals with lower-ranked outcomes. We estimate the optimal policy by maximizing a sample analog of the rank-dependent welfare over a properly constrained set of policies. We show that the average social welfare attained by our estimated policy converges to the maximal attainable welfare at n−1/2 rate uniformly over a large class of data distributions when the propensity score is known. We also show that this rate is minimax optimal. We provide an application of our method using the data from the National JTPA Study.Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Suggested Citation

  • Toru Kitagawa & Aleksey Tetenov, 2021. "Equality-Minded Treatment Choice," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(2), pages 561-574, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jnlbes:v:39:y:2021:i:2:p:561-574
    DOI: 10.1080/07350015.2019.1688664
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    Cited by:

    1. Riccardo Di Francesco, 2022. "Aggregation Trees," CEIS Research Paper 546, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 20 Nov 2023.
    2. FUJISHIMA Shota & HOSHINO Tadao & SUGAWARA Shinya, 2020. "Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Place-based Policies: Which Cities Should be Targeted?," Discussion papers 20036, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    3. Ryo Okui, 2024. "The 2023 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize: Recipient—Prof. Toru Kitagawa, Brown University and University College London," The Japanese Economic Review, Springer, vol. 75(3), pages 405-406, July.
    4. Kock, Anders Bredahl & Preinerstorfer, David & Veliyev, Bezirgen, 2023. "Treatment recommendation with distributional targets," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 234(2), pages 624-646.
    5. Dalia Ghanem & D'esir'e K'edagni & Ismael Mourifi'e, 2023. "Evaluating the Impact of Regulatory Policies on Social Welfare in Difference-in-Difference Settings," Papers 2306.04494, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2023.
    6. Chunrong Ai & Yue Fang & Haitian Xie, 2024. "Data-driven Policy Learning for Continuous Treatments," Papers 2402.02535, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2024.
    7. Yuehao Bai & Azeem M. Shaikh & Max Tabord-Meehan, 2024. "A Primer on the Analysis of Randomized Experiments and a Survey of some Recent Advances," Papers 2405.03910, arXiv.org.
    8. David Glynn & John Giardina & Julia Hatamyar & Ankur Pandya & Marta Soares & Noemi Kreif, 2024. "Integrating decision modeling and machine learning to inform treatment stratification," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(8), pages 1772-1792, August.
    9. Susan Athey & Stefan Wager, 2021. "Policy Learning With Observational Data," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(1), pages 133-161, January.
    10. Davide Viviano, 2019. "Policy Targeting under Network Interference," Papers 1906.10258, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2024.
    11. Anders Bredahl Kock & David Preinerstorfer, 2024. "Regularizing Discrimination in Optimal Policy Learning with Distributional Targets," Papers 2401.17909, arXiv.org.
    12. Hugo Bodory & Federica Mascolo & Michael Lechner, 2024. "Enabling Decision-Making with the Modified Causal Forest: Policy Trees for Treatment Assignment," Papers 2406.02241, arXiv.org.
    13. Daido Kido, 2022. "Distributionally Robust Policy Learning with Wasserstein Distance," Papers 2205.04637, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2022.
    14. Toru Kitagawa & Weining Wang & Mengshan Xu, 2022. "Policy Choice in Time Series by Empirical Welfare Maximization," Papers 2205.03970, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2023.
    15. Anders Bredahl Kock & David Preinerstorfer & Bezirgen Veliyev, 2022. "Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 117(539), pages 1311-1323, September.
    16. Toru Kitagawa & Sokbae Lee & Chen Qiu, 2022. "Treatment Choice with Nonlinear Regret," Papers 2205.08586, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    17. Toru Kitagawa & Jeff Rowley, 2024. "Bandit algorithms for policy learning: methods, implementation, and welfare-performance," The Japanese Economic Review, Springer, vol. 75(3), pages 407-447, July.
    18. Riccardo Di Francesco, 2024. "Aggregation Trees," Papers 2410.11408, arXiv.org.

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