This paper uses Wald's concept of the risk of a statistical decision function to address the question: How should sample data on treatment response be used to guide treatment choices in a heterogeneous population? Statistical treatment rules (STRs) are statistical decision functions that map...

Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which the argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision...

This paper modifies the Wald development of statistical decision theory to offer new perspective on the performance of certain statistical treatment rules. We study the quantile performance of test rules, ones that use the outcomes of hypothesis tests to allocate a population to two treatments....