I study the optimal design and analysis of randomized experiments for estimating finite-population average treatment effects when potential outcomes are known to be bounded, as with binary outcomes. Among all assignment mechanisms and a broad class of affine estimators, worst-case mean-squared error (MSE) is minimized by independent random assignment and an unconventional regression of the support-midpoint-centered outcome on the recentered treatment, with no intercept. This contrasts with the usual prescription of balanced complete randomization and difference-in-means estimation: when outcomes are bounded, randomness in the realized treatment share is informative. The worst-case gain over full-sample complete randomization is asymptotically small, but gains can be first-order relative to other designs: complete within-pair randomization and pair-fixed-effect regression have twice the worst-case MSE. I extend the result to allow for arbitrary estimators. Independent random assignment remains optimal, and the generally-nonlinear optimal estimator can meaningfully reduce worst-case MSE.
We study minimax-optimal designs and estimators for estimating the sample average treatment effect in finite population randomized experiments, where both design and estimator are unrestricted. For binary potential outcomes, we show this minimax risk is equivalent to the minimax risk $\rho_n^*$ of an estimation problem...
Timothy Sudijono, Edgar Dobriban, E. Tchetgen· 1 citation
In some randomized trials the primary outcome is costly or slow to measure, while auxiliary variables that predict it are available for everyone. The outcome can then be measured in a probability sample. We study an adaptive design in which the statistician who selects outcomes to measure is blinded to treatment assign...
Shuo-Yang Wang, Wan-Yue Zhang, Ling-Li Yang et al.· 0 citations
Randomization or design-based inference is becoming an increasingly popular tool for analysing data from randomized experiments: It does not require modelling assumptions on the distribution of outcomes or covariates, and hypothesis testing and estimation are respectively valid and unbiased in finite samples. Yet, conf...
Graphical causal inference supplies a complete theory of efficient covariate adjustment for the average treatment effect: one adjustment set, computable from the graph, is optimal under every compatible distribution. We show that this is a property of the average treatment effect's inverse-prevalence weights, not of ca...
We give an exact randomization-based confidence set for the average treatment effect (ATE) in matched-pair studies with a binary outcome, requiring neither monotonicity nor any distributional assumption beyond the within-pair coin flip. At its core is an analytic solution to the worst-case allocation of attributable ef...
We study how fast experimental designs can approach the semiparametric efficiency bound in finite samples, as measured by the excess variance of unadjusted treatment effect estimation. We prove an impossibility theorem: under weak conditions, no design can approach the variance bound uniformly over smooth outcome model...
Max Cytrynbaum· 0 citations
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