Contextual Bandits in a Survey Experiment on Charitable Giving: Within-Experiment Outcomes versus Policy Learning
慈善捐赠调查中的情境老虎机:实验内结果与政策学习
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation solicitation. The design balances two competing objectives: optimizing the outcomes for the subjects in the experiment (``cumulative regret minimization'') and gathering data that will be most useful for policy learning, that is, for…