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    Population Interference in Panel Experiments
    13 Apr 2021Working Paper Summaries

    Population Interference in Panel Experiments

    by Iavor I. Bojinov, Kevin Wu Han, and Guillaume Basse
    In panel experiments, units are exposed to different interventions over time. This article introduces a unifying framework for studying panel experiments with population interference, in which a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit's outcome. Findings have implications for fields as diverse as education, economics, and public health.
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    Author Abstract

    The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit's outcome, has received considerable attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in this setting are now readily recognized, and partial remedies are well known. Much less understood is the impact of population interference in panel experiments where treatment is sequentially randomized in the population, and the outcomes are observed at each time step. This paper proposes a general framework for studying population interference in panel experiments and presents new finite population estimation and inference results. Our findings suggest that, under mild assumptions, the addition of a temporal dimension to an experiment alleviates some of the challenges of population interference for certain estimands. In contrast, we show that the presence of carryover effects—that is, when past treatments may affect future outcomes—exacerbates the problem. Revisiting the special case of standard experiments with population interference, we prove a central limit theorem under weaker conditions than previous results in the literature and highlight the trade-off between flexibility in the design and the interference structure.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: March 2021
    • HBS Working Paper Number: 21-100
    • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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    Iavor I. Bojinov
    Iavor I. Bojinov
    Assistant Professor of Business Administration
    Richard Hodgson Fellow
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