Related papers: Learning treatment effects while treating those in…

Allocation of scarce resources is a recurring challenge for the public sector: something that emerges in areas as diverse as healthcare, disaster recovery, and social welfare. The complexity of these policy domains and the need for meeting…

Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual…

Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate the causal effects of a proposed treatment in many areas of science, from medicine and healthcare to the physical and biological sciences, from the social sciences to engineering, to public…

When evaluating the efficacy of social programs and medical treatments using randomized experiments, the estimated overall average causal effect alone is often of limited value and the researchers must investigate when the treatments do and…

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…

Practitioners in diverse fields such as healthcare, economics and education are eager to apply machine learning to improve decision making. The cost and impracticality of performing experiments and a recent monumental increase in electronic…

Estimation of individual treatment effects is commonly used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, it is often sufficient for the decision maker to have estimates of…

Randomized experiments have been the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of a treatment or policy. The classical complete randomization approach assigns treatments based on a prespecified probability and may lead to inefficient…

Identifying who should be treated is a central question in economics. There are two competing approaches to targeting - paternalistic and autonomous. In the paternalistic approach, policymakers optimally target the policy given observable…

Selective labels are a common feature of consequential decision-making applications, referring to the lack of observed outcomes under one of the possible decisions. This paper reports work in progress on learning decision policies in the…

What proportion of treated units actually benefited from an experimental intervention? What is the median or the largest individual treatment effect? This paper develops methods for answering such questions about the distribution of…

We consider the task of evaluating policies of algorithmic resource allocation through randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Such policies are tasked with optimizing the utilization of limited intervention resources, with the goal of…

Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…

Most existing notions of algorithmic fairness are one-shot: they ensure some form of allocative equality at the time of decision making, but do not account for the adverse impact of the algorithmic decisions today on the long-term welfare…

Growing use of machine learning in policy and social impact settings have raised concerns for fairness implications, especially for racial minorities. These concerns have generated considerable interest among machine learning and artificial…

In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…

Although there is now a large literature on policy evaluation and learning, much of the prior work assumes that the treatment assignment of one unit does not affect the outcome of another unit. Unfortunately, ignoring interference can lead…

The proliferation of algorithmic systems has fueled discussions surrounding the regulation and control of their social impact. Herein, we consider a system whose primary objective is to maximize utility by selecting the most qualified…

Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on…

We investigate how to exploit structural similarities of an individual's potential outcomes (POs) under different treatments to obtain better estimates of conditional average treatment effects in finite samples. Especially when it is…