Impact of selection bias in experiments where people treat each other

20 Jun

Selection biases in the participant pool generally have limited impact on inference. One way to estimate population treatment effect from effects estimated using biased samples is to check if treatment effect varies by ‘kinds of people’, and then weight the treatment effect to population marginals. So far so good.

When people treat each other, selection biases in participant pool change the nature of the treatment. For instance, in a Deliberative Poll, a portion of the treatment is other people. Naturally then, the exact treatment depends on the pool of people. Biases in the initial pool of participants mean treatment is different. For inference, one may exploit across group variation in composition.