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Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects from Randomized Experiments, with Application to the Optimal Planning of the Get-Out-the-Vote Campaign

Part of: PA editors' choice articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Kosuke Imai  and
Aaron Strauss
Kosuke Imai*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Aaron Strauss
Affiliation:
The Mellman Group, 1023 31st St NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20007. e-mail: aaronbs@gmail.com
*
e-mail: kimai@princeton.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

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Although a growing number of political scientists are conducting randomized experiments, many of them only report the average treatment effects and do not systematically explore the variation in treatment effects across subpopulations. This is unfortunate from a scientific point of view because heterogeneous treatment effects can provide additional substantive insights. This current state of affairs is also problematic from a policy makers' perspective since such studies do not identify subgroups for which treatments are effective. In this paper, we propose a formal two-step framework that first identifies heterogeneous treatment effects from a randomized experiment and then uses this information to derive an optimal policy about which treatment should be given to whom. Our proposed method avoids the risk of false discoveries that are likely in post hoc subgroup analysis routinely conducted in the discipline. We discuss our methodology in the context of get-out-the-vote randomized field experiments and show how the proposed two-step framework can be applied in real-world settings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Winter 2011 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Authors' note: The first version of this paper was circulated in December 2008 under the title of “Planning the Optimal Get-out-the-vote Campaign.” We thank useful comments from seminar participants at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editor. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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