“Experiment-as-Market: Incorporating Welfare into Randomized Controlled Trials,” Yusuke Narita, Yale University

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) enroll hundreds of millions of subjects and involve many human lives. To improve subjects’ welfare, I propose a design of RCTs that I call Experiment-as-Market (EXAM). EXAM produces a Pareto efficient allocation of treatment assignment probabilities, is asymptotically incentive compatible for preference elicitation, and unbiasedly estimates any causal effect estimable with standard RCTs. I quantify these properties by applying EXAM to a water cleaning experiment in Kenya (Kremer et al., 2011). In this empirical setting, compared to standard RCTs, EXAM substantially improves subjects’ predicted well-being while reaching similar treatment effect estimates with similar precision.

Yusuke Narita is an Assistant Professor at Yale University. His research involves studying education and labor topics using a variety of methods such as causal inference, machine learning, experiment/bandit, and structural econometric modeling. His work has been published in top journals including Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

This workshop series is being cosponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.