Inequality in treatment benefits: Can we determine if a new treatment benefits the many or the few?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many randomized controlled trials, the primary analysis focuses on the average treatment effect and does not address whether treatment benefits are widespread or limited to a select few. This problem affects many disease areas, since it stems from how randomized trials, often the gold standard for evaluating treatments, are designed and analyzed. Our goal is to learn about the fraction who benefit from a new treatment using randomized trial data. We consider the case where the outcome is ordinal, with binary outcomes as a special case. In general, the fraction who benefit is non-identifiable, and the best that can be obtained are sharp lower and upper bounds. Our contributions include (i) proving the plug-in estimator of the bounds can be inconsistent if support restrictions are made on the joint distribution of the potential outcomes; (ii) developing the first consistent estimator for this case; and (iii) applying this estimator to a randomized trial of a medical treatment to determine whether the estimates can be informative. Our estimator is computed using linear programming, allowing fast implementation. R code is provided.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it