This paper modifies the Wald development of statistical decision theory to offer new perspective on the performance of certain statistical treatment rules. We study the quantile performance of test rules, ones that use the outcomes of hypothesis tests to allocate a population to two treatments....

An important objective of empirical research on treatment response is to provide decision makers with information useful in choosing treatments. Manski (2000, 2002, 2003) showed how identification problems generate ambiguity about the identity of optimal treatment choices. This paper studies...

Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical unsupported assumptions or leaps of logic. Then the certitude of policy analysis is not credible. I develop a...