面板实验中的群体干扰

Population interference in panel experiments

Journal of Econometrics · 2023
被引 7
人大 AABS 4

中文导读

研究了面板实验中群体干扰(一个实验单元的处理影响另一单元结果)的影响,发现时间维度可缓解部分问题,但存在延续效应时问题更严重。

Abstract

The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit's outcome, has received considerable attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in this setting are now readily recognized, and partial remedies are well known. Less understood is the impact of population interference in panel experiments where treatment is sequentially randomized in the population, and the outcomes are observed at each time step. This paper proposes a general framework for studying population interference in panel experiments and presents new finite population estimation and inference results. Our findings suggest that, under mild assumptions, the addition of a temporal dimension to an experiment alleviates some of the challenges of population interference for certain estimands. In contrast, we show that the presence of carryover effects — that is, when past treatments may affect future outcomes — exacerbates the problem. Our results are illustrated through both an empirical analysis and an extensive simulation study.

面板实验总体干扰时序随机化结转效应