Optimal Experimental Design for Staggered Rollouts

Understand

In this paper, we study the design and analysis of experiments conducted on a set of units over multiple time periods where the starting time of the treatment may vary by unit.

• The design problem involves selecting an initial treatment time for each unit in order to most precisely estimate both the instantaneous and cumulative effects of the treatment.
• We first consider non-adaptive experiments, where all treatment assignment decisions are made prior to the start of the experiment.
• For this case, we show that the optimization problem is generally NP-hard, and we propose a near-optimal solution.