Medical research has evolved conventions for choosing sample size in randomized clinical trials that rest on the theory of hypothesis testing. Bayesians have argued that trials should be designed to maximize subjective expected utility in settings of clinical interest. This perspective is...

The merits of alternative income tax policies depend on the population distribution of preferences for income and leisure. Standard theory, which supposes that persons want more income and more leisure, does not predict how they resolve the tension between these desires. Empirical studies of...

This paper develops a formal language for study of treatment response with social interactions, and uses it to obtain new findings on identification of potential outcome distributions. Defining a person's treatment response to be a function of the entire vector of treatments received by the...

This paper develops a broad theme about policy choice under ambiguity through study of a particular decision criterion. The broad theme is that, where feasible, choice between a status quo policy and an innovation is better framed as selection of a treatment allocation than as a binary decision....

In the last decade a growing body of research has studied inference on partially identified parameters (e.g., Manski, 1990, 2003). In many cases where the parameter of interest is realvalued, the identification region is an interval whose lower and upper bounds may be estimated from sample data....

As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of cumulative population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness conditional on infection are higher than actual...

The Wald development of statistical decision theory addresses decision making with sample data. Wald's concept of a statistical decision function (SDF) embraces all mappings of the form [data Ç decision]. An SDF need not perform statistical inference; that is, it need not use data to draw...