Experiment-as-Market: Incorporating Welfare into Randomized Controlled Trials

Yusuke Narita ()

No 2127r, Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers from Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University

Abstract: Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) enroll hundreds of millions of subjects and involve many human lives. To improve subjects' welfare, I propose a design of RCTs that I call Experiment-as-Market (EXAM). EXAM produces a Pareto efficient allocation of treatment assignment probabilities, is asymptotically incentive compatible for preference elicitation, and unbiasedly estimates any causal effect estimable with standard RCTs. I quantify these properties by applying EXAM to a water cleaning experiment in Kenya (Kremer et al., 2011). In this empirical setting, compared to standard RCTs, EXAM substantially improves subjects' predicted well-being while reaching similar treatment effect estimates with similar precision.

Keywords: Research Ethics; Clinical Trial; Social Experiment; A/B Test; Market Design; Causal Inference; Development Economics; Spring Protection; Discrete Choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 99 pages
Date: 2018-04, Revised 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Experiment-as-Market: Incorporating Welfare into Randomized Controlled Trials (2019)
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