Economists have long been ambivalent about whether the discipline should focus on the analysis of markets or should be concerned with social interactions more generally. Recently the discipline has sought to broaden its scope while maintaining the rigor of modern economic analysis. Major...

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...

This paper extends my research applying statistical decision theory to treatment choice with sample data, using maximum regret to evaluate the performance of treatment rules. The specific new contribution is to study as-if optimization using estimates of illness probabilities in clinical choice...