Equality-Minded Treatment Choice
提出一种基于协变量估计最优处理分配策略的方法，目标最大化关注平等的秩依赖社会福利函数，适用于收入提升但再分配不可行的政策场景。
The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income is infeasible. This article develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assignment policy based on observable individual covariates when the policy objective is to maximize an equality-minded rank-dependent social welfare function, which puts higher weight on individuals with lower-ranked outcomes. We estimate the optimal policy by maximizing a sample analog of the rank-dependent welfare over a properly constrained set of policies. We show that the average social welfare attained by our estimated policy converges to the maximal attainable welfare at n−1/2 rate uniformly over a large class of data distributions when the propensity score is known. We also show that this rate is minimax optimal. We provide an application of our method using the data from the National JTPA Study.Supplementary materials for this article are available online.