FUNCTIONAL SEQUENTIAL TREATMENT ALLOCATION WITH COVARIATES

Abstract

We consider a sequential treatment problem with covariates. Given a realization of the covariate vector, instead of targeting the treatment with highest conditional expectation, the decision-maker targets the treatment which maximizes a general functional of the conditional potential outcome distribution, e.g., a conditional quantile, trimmed mean, or a socioeconomic functional such as an inequality, welfare, or poverty measure. We develop expected regret lower bounds for this problem and construct a near minimax optimal sequential assignment policy.