Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/10/2025
11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Chen Qiu, Assistant Professor from Cornell University will present to our economic graduate students and faculty Wednesday, October 1st in KTH 334!

Chen’s main field of research is Econometrics. Chen will be presenting his most recent working paper “Leave No One Undermined: Policy Targeting with Regret Aversion”, joint with Toru Kitagawa and Sokbae Lee.

Abstract

While the importance of personalized policymaking is widely recognized, fully personalized implementation remains rare in practice. We study the problem of policy targeting for a regret-averse planner when training data gives a rich set of observable characteristics while the assignment rules can only depend on its subset. Grounded in decision theory, our regret-averse criterion reflects a planner’s concern about regret inequality across the population, which generally leads to a fractional optimal rule due to treatment effect heterogeneity beyond the average treatment effects conditional on the subset characteristics. We propose a debiased empirical risk minimization approach to learn the optimal rule from data. Viewing our debiased criterion as a weighted least squares problem, we establish new upper and lower bounds for the excess risk, indicating a convergence rate of 1/n and asymptotic efficiency in certain cases. We apply our approach to the National JTPA Study and the International Stroke Trial.

Learn more about Chen’s work and connect with him through his professional website.