Optimal personalized treatment rules for marketing interventions: A review of methods, a new proposal, and an insurance case study

In many important settings, subjects can show signi cant heterogeneity in response to a stimulus or treatment". For instance, a treatment that works for the overall population might be highly ine ective, or even harmful, for a subgroup of subjects with speci c characteristics. Similarly, a new treatment may not be better than an existing treatment in the overall population, but there is likely a subgroup of subjects who would bene t from it. The notion that "one size may not fit all" is becoming increasingly recognized in a wide variety of elds, ranging from economics to medicine. This has drawn signi cant attention to personalize the choice of treatment, so it is optimal for each individual. An optimal personalized treatment is the one that maximizes the probability of a desirable outcome. We call the task of learning the optimal personalized treatment "personalized treatment learning". From the statistical learning perspective, this problem imposes some challenges, primarily because the optimal treatment is unknown on a given training set. A number of statistical methods have been proposed recently to tackle this problem

Robust and Heterogenous Odds Ratio: Estimating Price Sensitivity for Unbought Items

Problem definition: Mining for heterogeneous responses to an intervention is a crucial step for data-driven operations, for instance to personalize treatment or pricing. We investigate how to estimate price sensitivity from transaction-level data. In causal inference terms, we estimate heterogeneous treatment effects when (a) the response to treatment (here, whether a customer buys a product) is binary, and (b) treatment assignments are partially observed (here, full information is only available for purchased items). Methodology/Results: We propose a recursive partitioning procedure to estimate heterogeneous odds ratio, a widely used measure of treatment effect in medicine and social sciences. We integrate an adversarial imputation step to allow for robust inference even in presence of partially observed treatment assignments. We validate our methodology on synthetic data and apply it to three case studies from political science, medicine, and revenue management. Managerial Implications: Our robust heterogeneous odds ratio estimation method is a simple and intuitive tool to quantify heterogeneity in patients or customers and personalize interventions, while lifting a central limitation in many revenue management data