Randomization Test for the Specification of Interference Structure

01/13/2023

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by   Tadao Hoshino, et al.

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This study considers testing the specification of spillover effects in causal inference. We focus on experimental settings in which the treatment assignment mechanism is known to researchers and develop a new randomization test utilizing a hierarchical relationship between different exposures. Compared with existing approaches, our approach is essentially applicable to any null exposure specifications and produces powerful test statistics without a priori knowledge of the true interference structure. As empirical illustrations, we revisit two existing social network experiments: one on farmers' insurance adoption and the other on anti-conflict education programs.