DIW Applied Micro Seminar

Summary:  This talk will provide a survey of several papers on the theory and practice of experimental design. I will compare different objectives (estimator precision, outcomes of participants, informing policy choice to maximize average outcomes, and informing policy choice to maximize utilitarian welfare), and their implications for experimental design. I will consider heuristic algorithms, will prove approximate optimality results for some of these algorithms, and will discuss several empirical applications.