*Note the unusual location of this talk.*
Speaker's Page: http://economics.ubc.ca/faculty-and-staff/erik-snowberg/.
UBC news-release on Dr. Snowberg: http://news.ubc.ca/2016/03/15/esteemed-economist-joins-ubc-as-new-canada-excellence-research-chair/
Abstract: This paper proposes a decision-theoretic framework for experiment design. We model experimenters as ambiguity averse decision-makers, who trade-off subjective expected performance, and robustness. This framework suitably accounts for experimenters' preferences for randomization, and the circumstances in which randomization occurs: whenever available sample size becomes large enough. We illustrate the practical value of such a framework by studying the issue of rerandomization. We show that rerandomization creates a trade-off between subjective performance and robustness but that loss in robustness due to rerandomization grows very slowly with the number of assignment draws.