Optimal Experimental Design for Staggered Rollouts

Experimentation has become an increasingly prevalent tool for guiding policy choices, firm decisions, and product innovation. A common hurdle in designing experiments is the lack of statistical power. In this paper, we study optimal multi-period experimental design under the constraint that the treatment cannot be easily removed once implemented; for example, a government or firm might implement treatment in different geographies at different times, where the treatment cannot be easily removed due to practical constraints. The design problem is to select which units to treat at which time, intending to test hypotheses about the effect of the treatment. When the potential outcome is a linear function of a unit effect, a time effect, and observed discrete covariates, we provide an analytically feasible solution to the design problem where the variance of the estimator for the treatment effect is at most 1+O(1/N^2) times the variance of the optimal design, where N is the number of units. This solution assigns units in a staggered treatment adoption pattern, where the proportion treated is a linear function of time. In the general setting where outcomes depend on latent covariates, we show that historical data can be utilized in the optimal design. We propose a data-driven local search algorithm with the minimax decision criterion to assign units to treatment times. We demonstrate that our approach improves upon benchmark experimental designs through synthetic experiments on real-world data sets from several domains, including healthcare, finance, and retail. Finally, we consider the case where the treatment effect changes with the time of treatment, showing that the optimal design treats a smaller fraction of units at the beginning and a greater share at the end.