The CSAP Workshop on Quantative Research Methods presents:
Aislinn Bohren„ assistant professor, Economics Department, University of Pennsylvania: “Designing Experiments to Measure Spillover Effects”.
Abstract: This paper formalizes the design of experiments intended specifically to study spillover effects. By first randomizing the intensity of treatment within clusters and then randomly assigning individual treatment conditional on this cluster-level intensity, a novel set of treatment effects can be identified. We develop a formal framework for consistent estimation of these effects, and provide explicit expressions for power calculations. We show that the power to detect average treatment effects declines precisely with the quantity that identifies the novel treatment effects.
Aislinn Bohren is an assistant professor in the economics department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie in the econometrics of experimental design and microeconomic theory, including learning and information aggregation, reputation and contract theory.