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...

Social interactions make communicable disease a core concern of public health policy. A prevalent problem is scarcity of empirical evidence that are informative about how interventions affect population behavior and illness. Randomized trials, which have been important to evaluation of...

Attempting to shed light on the optimal size of government, economists have analyzed planning problems that specify a set of feasible taxation-spending policies and a social welfare function. The analysis characterizes the optimal policy choice of a planner who knows the welfare achieved by each...

Americans may be uncertain of their future Social Security benefits for several reasons, including uncertainty about their future labor earnings, the formula now determining Social Security benefits, and the future structure of the Social Security system. To learn how Americans perceive their...

This paper uses Wald's concept of the risk of a statistical decision function to address the question: How should sample data on treatment response be used to guide treatment choices in a heterogeneous population? Statistical treatment rules (STRs) are statistical decision functions that map...

Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which the argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision...