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arXiv · 2405.13241

Selecting Experimental Sites for External Validity

Michael Gechter·Keisuke Hirano·Jean Lee·Mahreen Mahmud·Orville Mondal·Jonathan Morduch·Saravana Ravindran·Abu S. Shonchoy
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Abstract

Policy decisions often depend on evidence generated elsewhere. We take a Bayesian decision-theoretic approach to choosing where to experiment to optimize external validity. We frame external validity through a policy lens, developing a prior specification for the joint distribution of site-level treatment effects using a microeconometric structural model and allowing for other sources of heterogeneity. With data from South Asia, we show that, relative to basing policies on experiments in optimal sites, large efficiency losses result from instead using evidence from randomly-selected sites or, conversely, from sites with the largest expected treatment effects.

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Michael Gechter, Keisuke Hirano, Jean Lee, Mahreen Mahmud, Orville Mondal, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Abu S. Shonchoy. 2024-05-21. Selecting Experimental Sites for External Validity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13241

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