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| Preface | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Rumsfeld and the Limits to Knowledge | |
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| Using Policy Analysis to Inform Decisions | |
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| Organization of the Book | |
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| Policy Analysis | |
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| Policy Analysis with Incredible Certitude | |
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| The Logic and Credibility of Policy Analysis | |
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| Incentives for Certitude | |
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| Support for Certitude in Philosophy of Science | |
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| Conventional Certitudes | |
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| CBO Scoring of Pending Legislation | |
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| Scoring the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010; Credible Interval Scoring; Can Congress Cope with Uncertainty? | |
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| British Norms | |
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| Dueling Certitudes | |
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| The RAND and IDA Reports on Illegal Drug Policy | |
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| The National Research Council Assessment | |
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| Conflating Science and Advocacy | |
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| Friedman and Educational Vouchers | |
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| Wishful Extrapolation | |
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| Selective Incapacitation | |
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| Extrapolation from Randomized Experiments: The FDA Drug Approval Process | |
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| The Study Population and the Population of Interest | |
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| The Experimental Treatments and the Treatments of Interest | |
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| The Outcomes Measured in Experiments and the Outcomes of Interest | |
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| The FDA and Conventional Certitude | |
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| Campbell and the Primacy of Internal Validity | |
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| Illogical Certitude | |
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| Heritability | |
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| What Does "More Important" Mean? | |
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| Heritability and Social Policy | |
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| Gene Measurement | |
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| Media Overreach | |
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| "The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers" Peer Review and Credible Reporting | |
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| Predicting Policy Outcomes | |
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| Deterrence and the Death Penalty | |
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| Estimates Using Data on Homicide Rates across States and Years | |
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| Analysis of Treatment Response | |
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| Statistical Inference and Identification | |
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| Predicting Outcomes under Policies That Mandate a Treatment | |
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| Sentencing and Recidivism | |
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| Background | |
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| Our Analysis | |
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| Analysis Assuming Individualistic Treatment Response | |
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| Numerical Findings | |
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| Choosing a Policy | |
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| Identical Treatment Units | |
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| Before-and-After Studies | |
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| Difference-in-Differences Studies | |
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| Employment in Fast-Food Restaurants and the Minimum Wage | |
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| Identical Treatment Groups | |
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| Experiments with Random Assignment of Treatments | |
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| The "Gold Standard" | |
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| Randomized Experiments in Practice | |
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| Extrapolation | |
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| Compliance | |
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| The Illinois Unemployment Insurance Experiment | |
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| Random Compliance | |
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| Intention-to-Treat | |
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| The Mixing Problem | |
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| Extrapolation from the Perry Preschool Project | |
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| Social Interactions | |
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| Local and Global Interactions | |
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| Credible Analysis of Experimental Data | |
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| Random Treatment Choice in Observational Studies | |
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| Rational Treatment Choice and Selection Bias | |
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| Outcome Optimization with Perfect Foresight | |
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| Regression Discontinuity Analysis | |
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| Modeling Rational Treatment Choice | |
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| Outcome Optimization as a Model of Sentencing Distributional Assumptions | |
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| Predicting Behavior | |
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| Income Taxation and Labor Supply | |
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| The Theory of Labor Supply | |
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| Empirical Analysis | |
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| Basic Revealed-Preference Analysis | |
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| Illustration: Labor Supply under Progressive and Proportional Taxes | |
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| Discrete Choice Analysis | |
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| Random Utility Model Representation of Behavior | |
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| Attribute Representation of Alternatives and Decision Makers | |
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| Analysis with Incomplete Attribute Data | |
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| Practicality | |
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| College Choice in America | |
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| Predicting the Enrollment Effects of Student Aid Policy | |
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| Power and Price of the Analysis | |
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| Discrete Choice Analysis Today | |
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| Predicting Behavior under Uncertainty | |
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| How Do Youth Infer the Returns to Schooling? | |
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| How Do Potential Criminals Perceive Sanctions Regimes? | |
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| Measuring Expectations | |
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| Pill, Patch, or Shot? | |
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| Perspectives on Rational Choice | |
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| As-If Rationality | |
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| Bounded Rationality | |
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| Biases and Heuristics | |
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| Widespread Irrationality or Occasional Cognitive Illusions? | |
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| The Common Thread Is Certitude | |
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| Policy Decisions | |
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| Planning with Partial Knowledge | |
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| Treating X-Pox | |
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| Elements of Decision Theory | |
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| States of Nature | |
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| The Welfare Function | |
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| Welfare Functions in Studies of Optimal Income Taxation | |
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| The Mirrlees Study | |
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| Decision Criteria | |
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| Elimination of Dominated Actions | |
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| Weighting States and the Expected Welfare Criterion | |
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| Criteria for Decision Making under Ambiguity | |
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| Maximin | |
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| Minimax Regret | |
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| Using Different Criteria to Treat X-Pox | |
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| Search Profiling with Partial Knowledge of Deterrence | |
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| Vaccination with Partial Knowledge of Effectiveness | |
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| Background | |
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| Internal and External Effectiveness | |
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| The Planning Problem | |
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| Partial Knowledge of External Effectiveness | |
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| Choosing a Vaccination Rate | |
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| Rational and Reasonable Decision Making | |
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| The Savage Argument for Consistency | |
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| Axiomatic Rationality and Actualist Rationality | |
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| Axiomatic and Actualist Perspectives on Subjective Probability | |
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| Ellsberg on Ambiguity | |
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| The Quest for Rationality and the Search for Certitude | |
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| Diversified Treatment Choice | |
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| Diversification and Profiling | |
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| Allocating a Population to Two Treatments | |
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| The Welfare Function | |
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| A Status Quo Treatment and an Innovation | |
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| Expected Welfare | |
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| Maximin | |
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| Minimax Regret | |
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| Choosing Sentences for Convicted Juvenile Offenders | |
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| Allocation of Wealth to a Safe and Risky Investment | |
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| Risk-Averse Planning | |
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| Diversification and Equal Treatment of Equals | |
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| Ex Ante and Ex Post Equal Treatment | |
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| Combining Consequentialism and Deontological Ethics | |
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| Adaptive Diversification | |
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| Adaptive Minimax Regret | |
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| Implementation in Centralized Health Care Systems | |
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| The AMR Criterion and the Practice of Randomized Clinical Trials | |
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| Fraction of the Population Receiving the Innovation | |
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| Group Subject to Randomization | |
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| Measurement of Outcomes | |
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| Diversification across Time or Space | |
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| Diversification by Cohort | |
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| Laboratories of Democracy | |
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| Adaptive Partial Drug Approval | |
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| The Present Approval Process | |
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| Binary versus Partial Approval | |
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| Adaptive Partial Licensing | |
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| Collective Decision Processes | |
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| Majority-Rule Voting with Single-Peaked Preferences | |
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| The Credibility of Single-Peaked Preferences | |
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| Strategic Interactions | |
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| Learning and Heterogeneity of Policy Preferences | |
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| Bilateral Negotiations | |
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| Pareto Optimal Allocations | |
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| Incentive-Compatible Processes | |
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| Teacher Evaluation in New York City | |
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| Laissez-Faire | |
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| Social Learning from Private Experiences | |
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| Laissez-Faire Learning and Adaptive Diversification | |
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| Policy Analysis and Decisions | |
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| Institutional Separation of Analysis and Decisions | |
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| Doing Better | |
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| Derivations for Criteria to Treat X-Pox | |
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| The Minimax-Regret Allocation to a Status Quo Treatment and an Innovation | |
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| Treatment Choice with Partial Knowledge of Response to Both Treatments | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |