Ranking Treatment Saturations under Clustered Network Interference

Abstract

In this paper, we study how to rank a finite set of treatment saturations for a target population with clustered network interference. We propose an empirical success (ES) ranking rule that, for each pair of saturations, selects the saturation level with the higher estimated welfare using data from a two-stage randomized saturation design. We adopt the statistical decision theory framework with additively separable regret loss to assess the performance of the ES ranking rule. We derive non-asymptotic upper bounds on the maximum regret of the ES ranking rule that depend on the within-cluster network only through a single combinatorial summary of its dependency structure. We exploit these bounds to characterize a quasi-optimal first-stage saturation distribution within the two-stage randomized saturation design. We further show that the ES ranking rule is asymptotically optimal among threshold ranking rules in the sense of minimizing an upper bound on the worst-case regret.