Treatment Choice in Heterogeneous Populations Using Experiments Without Covariate Data

Abstract

I examine the problem of treatment choice when a planner observes (i) covariates that describe each member of a population of interest and (ii) the outcomes of an experiment in which subjects randomly drawn from this population are randomly assigned to treatment groups within which all subjects receive the same treatment. Covariate data for the subjects of the experiment are not available. The optimal treatment rule is to divide the population into subpopulations whose members share the same covariate value, and then to choose for each subpopulation a treatment that maximizes its mean outcome. However the planner cannot implement this rule. I draw on my work on nonparametric analysis of treatment response to address the planner's problem