Experimentation at Scale / Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Muralidharan, Karthik.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Niehaus, Paul.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23957.

NBER working paper series no. w23957

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

This paper makes the case for greater use of randomized experiments "at scale." We review various critiques of experimental program evaluation in developing countries, and discuss how experimenting at scale along three specific dimensions - the size of the sampling frame, the number of units treated, and the size of the unit of randomization - can help alleviate them. We find that program evaluation randomized controlled trials published in top journals over the last 15 years have typically been "small" in these senses, but also identify a number of examples - including from our own work - demonstrating that experimentation at much larger scales is both feasible and valuable.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2017.